But I think the intriguing part is not the situation in Korea itself as much as the reaction to it in the US.
I just read in Business Week that the US slipped from number three --I'm pretty sure we're talking raw numbers rather than percentages-- to number ten in global broadband rankings. It's not altogether impossible that this decline is going to get worse rather than better in the near term.
And if it doesn't, if something like Wi-Max suddenly turns things around, then it could be even more interesting. Let's hope it's the latter rather than the former. But even then, there would be reprecussions for a rather large number of corporations beyond just music.
Atmel says SoCs from the AT91 series have already been designed into industrial automation systems, MP-3/WMA players, data acquisition products, pagers, point-of-sales terminals, medical equipment, GPS units and networking systems.
That being the case, I'd like to see a DIY project to use one of these to go with a half-height DVD player for a low cost car DVD MP3 player.
No doubt such things will eventually be cheap retail. But till then a recipe for a little DIY solder job would be cool. Besides, by the time DVD car MP3 players are cheap, the same design could probably be used for the Blu-Ray MP3 player.
They say it has USB2.0 already. So looks like a half-height DVD with a power supply in a USB case would get you pretty close. How do you get the sound out to an amp though?
Yep, I just ran memtest86 on my sister-in-law's IBM Thinkpad P4M 1700 notebook. The memory was fine but it still craps out under strain. Works fine with a linux LiveCD, but under XP running a few apps it sounds and feels just like a hair dryer and locks up tight in a few hours. The hardware isn't damaged, it's just not able to run so freakin' hot.
This is by far Via's biggest problem. I know several people looking for one and I never see them in any bricks-and-mortar hardware shops. I don't put much belief in the idea that shops are intentionally keeping them out, I think Via just doesn't realize how much demand there is in the DIY market and they're not pushing hard enough. They really need to have a little more faith in themselves and get these things out in the retail channel in a big way.
My most loved car is a '79 Toyota Celica with absolutely no power anything. The car was originally sold as a sports edition and it was considered more sporty to not have power steering since you get a better feel for the road without it. At high speed you really don't need power steering. It's for parking and such.
My understanding is that before hops, marijuana buds were used in the beer making process. You know that skunky taste? Yeah, well it used to be stronger. And the buzz, well I bet it was a good buzz.
So while we're at it let's add coca too. Now that would be an all-american brew ALA Coca Cola. Coca Beer with old fashioned skunky bud kick. Yow! It's party time.
Ah hah!
Well, you see this is a very interesting point in my opinion. In the country where I live, Taiwan, half of the people have this level of DSL service and it costs about twenty three dollars a month with free local phone service included.
Interestingly, we only have one Internet provider that is majority owned by the government. Actually there are sub-providers, but they all have to buy from the government monopoly. So where's the real problem for people in, say for instance, the US? The problem is they're being charged excessively for bandwidth that doesn't cost as much as they are being charged. Why is that? Hmm, could it be that companies like Warner and Sony actually own many ISPs and that the ISPs cooperate with the telecoms to lobby congress to create regulations that artificially keep the prices high? I'm pretty sure that these are the insensitive clods you are looking for.
So, you see, if bandwidth wasn't being artificially limited, you would have no problem trading.shn files and all the artwork you could possibly want. You could trade hi-def concert footage as well. You could trade whatever you wanted. Discs are outdated and if the US wants to slip behind the rest of the world, that's a pity but the rest of the world is not going to slow down and wait for it to catch up.
However, none of this really relates much to my original point which is that there is a big difference between music or the love and appreciation of high quality music and the music game or as they sometimes say, the industry. The latter is what this whole debate is about. It has jack shit to do with music.
This is the whole point. If you want to stick to a disc model of distribution then perhaps there is a place for the labels. But exactly why do we need to stick with a disc distribution system? I have 2Meg DSL. I can download a CD in a matter of minutes. I'm subsidizing that connection so the band can communicate with me. Bands have no business pressing discs, neither do labels. There is no need for this out-dated, expensive distribution technology when the customers themselves are already paying for the modern, efficent distribution. The distribution bill has already been paid --by the customers. Creating more costs to distribute another less efficient way is merely wasteful.
A band doesn't even need a server, they can just use P2P.
So, distribution is free. That's not the point. The point is that simply recording music and having the ability to distribute in volume isn't what the music game is really all about. In fact, it's about marketing. You know --come in here dear boy, have a cigar.
But notice I use the phrase "the music game" rather than music. Music isn't about marketing and music doesn't require enormous finances. Playing the music game is all about marketing and finance. The music game can end as far as I'm concerned.
I think this idea of the role of narration is clearly related to what you've just said.
Most novels and short stories are written from the literary perspective of a third person omniscient narrator and this is part of their charm.
I think the seduction of interactive fiction partly stems from this desire to transcend the role of the reader and ascend to the role of the omniscient narrator --to become god-like.
But this is a lot like the story in Fantasia. You may dream of incredible powers, but when you really try them on you may easily find they give you more choices than you're comfortable with.
But you see, here is the whole crux of the issue. If it really does cost next to nothing to distribute video over the Net, especially with the user subsidizing the connection, then how do you justify the prices?
You can't --well at least not without resorting to sunday school guilt tactics that might sound nice in an on-line forum but don't do shit in the real world where the average person is far too cynical. So you can't convince the consumer that it's wrong to redistribute. The only thing you can do is play the DRM game, but obviously encryption is worthless when you're sending your precious "secret" to an audiance that has no interest in preserving the secret.
Asking the consumer to pay for the bandwidth AND the content simply will not work. A more likely business model is an ISP offering free movies to keep subscribers --and considering it an honor!
Digital content is worth the cheapest media it can be printed on and I just bought a stack of DVD+Rs 4Xs for 16cents a piece. No shit.
Yeah, you're probably right. Just go for it. It's not a question of having power supplies. God, I have tons. I have a variety of simple audio amp schematics too since I've been wondering about this for a long time.
I'm tempted to just tear into it right now. But as usual I've got a stack of unfinished projects that have to come first or at least by put away before I start something new and unfortunately some of them are too big to be put away. They've just got to be finished.
I was hoping maybe somebody had tried it and had some pointers. I've had very little results googling for it. I did find that people were using battery chargers to use audio amps in the house. I thought that was rather amusing and on the more refined side there was the Black Widow DIY torrodial power supplies. I even have some nice big 500watt torroids that I considered using to do something like that. But those were more targeted at high power bass end of things. I'm thinking just lightweight midrange and tweeter drivers.
My interest has actually declined a bit since I found powered PC speakers that sounded surprisingly nice when delegated to just the high end of the frequencies that cost next to nothing. I have six of those in the corners and hidden under the desks in one room along with a big subwoofer and a pair of mid-range towers and that room sounds so freakin' good even with low bit-rate mono Mp3s.
Still, I do have all those power supplies. I think I have about fifteen of them.
Anybody have anything on this one?
I want to make an audio amp out of the parts in a PSU. It doesn't have to be super high powered and it could take purchasing an extra part or two.
Anybody have any leads?
The road train --or let's call it semi-autonomous guidance for personal land vehicles-- idea obviously has to come before the flying car.
This is the answer to all the people saying what-if there is an accident or what-if I break down. If you were part of a linked group of vehicles flying in tight formation this wouldn't be such a problem. But before we're going to see that in the air, you'd expect to see it on a road.
However, it's not necessarily that far off. The I-15 in San Diego in the section that goes to Escondido has been a testbed for this kind of technolgy for years.
Informative?!
This is blatant disinformation. You're calling the 1930s a routine recession? Well, by recent standards I guess that almost sounds reasonable.
But your attempt to shift the blame from corrupt monopolies that sank the economy to the administration that picked up the pieces is pure propoganda. Again, no surprise these days.
As a matter of fact, this is true for every machine including the simple ones like the inclined plane and the pulley. Once you stop, you're taking your chances.
This is true for the earliest steam engines. In fact, at that time it was painfully obvious. If your engine went down, it might never start again without a complete re-build. It was cheaper to keep it running around the clock than to let it go down.
This is also true for the Gigawatt steam turbogenerator on the other side of your electrical outlet. Bringing those down almost necessarily causes damage because of the phase change of steam to water. This is one of the biggest challenges for large scale solar thermal power.
This is true for your car, this is true for your blender, this is true for your drill and your circular saw. This is true for every machine. This is true for the sun itself. Try re-booting that sucker.
But as we can see from some of these latter examples, some machines aren't designed to run continuously because they are crafted in a manner that allows them to finish a job in a relatively short period. A blender is an example of a machine that can probably still be considered an acceptable design if it cannot run for more than ten minutes without overheating. It is reasonable that a minute or so should be enough to blend most ingredients, so a limitation on run time is quite acceptable in such a case. So, you need to look at the context in which the device is used before you simply say that the design is fucked. It's a given that all machines ideally work better when in continuous use, but there are cases where you can make trade-offs.
A PC, is not one of them. If your PC gets too hot to leave on. You have a fucked design. That's not to say that no computing device should ever be allowed to get hot. But the key here is "PC" which stands for personal computer. From a design perspective, a personal computer that becomes too hot to leave running continuously or consumes to much electricity or requires a cooling system that produces too much waste heat or noise to be used in a personal setting should be considered a poorly designed personal computer.
So, in this sense I would argue that the entire P4 design is fatally flawed. As a matter of fact, the Taiwanese board manufacturers were complaining about this fact at this year's Computex in Taipei. This was supposed to be they year of the miniature form factor, low-power PC. But the rumor was that Intel had threatened to cut ties to companies who didn't front their boards with Intel P4 chipsets which were everywhere.
I don't know. He seemed to avoid the issues presnted to him in a couple of places.
This question: How do you enforce rights in an ownership society? (Score:5, Interesting) by zzyzx
Was right to the heart of things and well placed as just a few questions ahead Badnarik had just spoken rather ambiguously about his position on copyright.
Badnarik went from saying it was too early to say what was right in the copyright game to switching around and talking about how important intellectual property was comparing it to the importance of real property as though the latter was a minor point in comparison. Then, to top it off, instead of addressing this glaring issue about how a Libertarian government would protect free speech, he trails off talking about how the market will take care of it. Huh?
Then a few questions later he says that literacy in the US has declined dramatically since the nineteenth century. Wow. I wonder where he got that statistic. Whodda thunk?
People keep looking for a cause for the problems with IT which is generally taken as a synonym for technology. But there is no cause to discover because it's not that something has happened, it is more that something happened and now it is over and what is being sought as a cause is actually nothing but an absence.
The absence, in turn, is nothing but the end of grand business opportunity that was akin to the development of the high volume press at the end of the nineteenth century --the CMOS process. And, the observant will note that in fact CMOS literally is a form of printing so this analogy is quite intriguing.
The whole Moore's law thing was more of a business law than anything else and now it is winding down after an incredible run. That's the cause of almost all the problems in IT and the technology that IT serves as a proxy for. It's hardly mysterious where the problems come from, but knowing the cause does not suggest any solution.
Well, this is again the chicken and egg thing.
There is such a thing as carbon sequestration. The problem there is not that it's necessarily dangerous or harmful to the environment. After all, plants are a form of carbon sequestration. There are limitless variations on the theme.
The trick is that if your only source of useable energy is hydrocarbons, you can't easily get ahead releasing them as a gas just in order to put them back in some solid form.
But that limitation only exists when hydrocarbons are the only source of useable energy. Once there are alternatives in place that rival the scale of hydrocarbons, the carbon issue isn't such a problem. Other emissions like nitrous oxides and sulfur can also be controlled. So, it's not really that hydrocarbons are evil; it's more that over reliance on one type of resource naturally leads to problems.
It might make sense to have a few large locations dedicated to sequestrations relying on something like terrestrial thermal or orbital solar and continuing to use hydrocarbons for things like vehicles. Or geothermal is another interesting option. I think solar thermal and geothermal are by far the most underestimated large-scale energy sources that are available in the here and now.
As for platinum, well again it's all such a chicken and egg issue. If we had cheap access to space we could probably harvest precious metals in bulk from the asteroid belt making them no longer precious on earth and allowing for cheap fuel cells. But of course if we had cheap access to space we could just put up solar satellites and get electricity directly from there.
And speaking of space, that's where we see the best evidence that hydrocarbons are created by planets devoid of life. So, there's likely a nearly endless supply of hydrocarbons within the Earth itself which will eventually make the existing worries about non-renewable resources seem ridiculous since they're probably all renewable.
But the point, of course, is cost. And here is where this story is quite impressive.
I'm not a pessimist about technology, but I'm disappointed in what has passed for technology since, say the 1960s. As they say --where's the flying cars damnit? It was supposed to be like radio, black and white TV, color TV, high speed Internet, holographic immersion, direct neural interface and beyond already. It's 2004! What happened? It's practically the same as the seventies.
You know, when the iMac counts as a technological breakthrough things are slow. No offense to the Mac lovers, but it was more of a design breaktrhough than anything. That's just one of many examples of that same thing where it's a new style as opposed to a radically new technology. Cars get this treatment all the time. The differnce between the new model and the old model is the freakin' plastic brake light reflectors. That's not an advance. That sucks.
The Internet itself is another example. Just because a series of factors made it seem to emerge suddenly, it isn't really the case that it happened suddenly at all. Mostly it was just a matter of merging rather dated defence research into the private sector. Same with a lot of chip designs. It's not really all that amazing or recent. It just took a long time to make it your way.
And as for CMOS process tecnologies and the whole Moore's Law thing. Give me a break, that was not and is not really about pusing the edge of technology as much as it was about markets being controlled by only a few players being able to afford to compete.
Immersion lithography which is part of what is making China so hot was experimented with decades ago and abandoned because it didn't fit the business plans of the likes of Intel or IBM at the time.
So, when I see this stuff about China being the new "technology research hotbed" it doesn't strike me as being all that meaningful. It's the new manufacturing center for chips. So what.
I mean besides CMOS chip technology which is already very, very mature its hard to point to real major technology that has been developed in the last forty years with any serious economic significance. Okay lasers, though for the most part just the small ones, have improved a lot and small motors are more reliable. Anything outside of IT though? Even MEMS is still mostly about IT. There's promises about ultra efficient fuel cells and nanotubes and such but there were promises forty years ago as well. They even had better promises back then. We're still building houses out of wooden sticks for crying out loud.
Technology outside of IT moves unbelievably slowly.
So, if China is where the chips are going to be made then naturally you'll have a lot of designers there making consumer products, but is that really a technology research hotbed? I'd call it more like a designer extravaganza.
I do hope it could be otherwise, but I don't know. Something tells me we're still going to have internal combustion autos a hundred years from now.
However, like I said, I'm not a pessimist. I think the revenge we will get is that we'll live incredibly long lives so we will eventually see the flying cars, space elevators and what-not. We'll just have to be very patient. All I expect out of China is cheaper PCs. As if they weren't cheap already.
In fact, Chinese versions of Office have been very difficult for Open Office. As of 1.1 there have been many improvements, but people got burned early on and this really hurt the effort.
The Chinese language is an interesting battleground in Open Source, especially when it comes to productivity apps since a localized desktop isn't really that different from the western version once you get the key-in system set up. An office suite, on the other hand, is quite different between English and Chinese. Once you start getting into fancy fonts and positioning, it gets a bit hectic since Chinese can be written in all sorts of ways on the page and typically inculdes both Chinese and western writing and punctuation. From what I've seen, it's the shift between single byte western punctuation and double byte Chinese punctuation that can cause a lot of problems with erroneous characters and messed up formatting.
One of the interesting issues here is that the simpified Mainland Chinese tends to be further along than Traditional Chinese used in Taiwan. This is a bit of a reversal of what happened in closed source. Initially, back in the DOS and earlier days, Taiwan was far ahead of the mainland with a word processor suite called ET3 named after the company that had developed the font set and key-in system-- Eten. Eventually, their tech was bought up by Microsoft as well and was eventually included in the unicode standard.
But in Open Source things change, especially politically.
Although Taiwan has Linux User groups, it's surprising how few people are willing to consider Open Source as an option given the prevalence of tech in the society. In many cases, there is a fear that if Microsoft slips the local economy will do so as well. But since the local economy is all about hardware, this seems a bit odd. They have the most to gain. It's a very conservative society in many ways though and especially when it comes to business, so it's not that surprising. If it aint broke, don't fix it. They just aren't seeing that it is broke and they will benefit more than anybody by getting it fixed.
But yeah, there are still issues with Chinese compared to Office and this is a major battleground where a lot of the soldiers are hesitant to fight out of a false sense of allegiance.
This isn't so unusual though.
Let's look at the drug war in which the conventional liberal position is that the government needs to back off.
It's not as though liberals are inherently Stallinists obsessed with controlling everyone with a huge government bureaucracy. That sort of assumption which he seems to imply is a great disservice to liberals.
Liberals are all for individual rights, you know like as in the word "liberty." It's surprising how difficult this very simple and obvious connection is for many people.
I am also wondering how this got on Slashdot.
on
The Age of the Essay
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· Score: 4, Interesting
But I'm pleased in a way. I have an MA in Composition and Rhetoric and one of my many jobs is grading GRE practice essays. I did about fifty this afternoon in fact. See, that's why I'm a/. junky. Essays and arguments are my life's blood.
However, I'd like to point something out to the author and it's something I see a lot of which is a misperception regarding what students are writing about in school.
Especially when people think about testing they assume that essay topics are completely inane. Well perhaps this has been true in the past, but these days I see many essay topics that do focus on very broad personal issues and encourage the students to explore things using any creativity they can come up with. So the problem that he's discussing in his essay is somewhat contrived. In fact, students are encouraged to write about unusal, quirky and personal issues even in test settings. Not only that, but some of them come up with some really beautiful work even in the constrained environment of a test session. There are limits, but it's really not that bad.
I'm trying to think of an example. Here, today I had some that were on the topic of living through a difficult experience. That's a very general topic that refers you specifically into your own personal life. I read some real beauties. Actually that wasn't GRE though. That was another class. I had a bunch of GMAT today, but that's another story as well. Those are fun in a different way.
Anyhow, it's really not so bad and I always teach the students that if you get a lousy topic you can usually write your way around it.
My MA was in Comp, but as an undergrad I did Creative Writing. Any MFAs in the house? Losers!
There's no way you can tell me that these kinds of writing courses make writing boring. If anything they can get too edgey. We used to have all kinds of hardcore sexual stuff written about other people in the class and it was like who's going to say when? I guess it depends where you go to school.
Well, I'm rambling at 4:50Am so let me just close up with this bit of writing advice. If you want to have good time as a writing major try San Diego State. They've got a sweet writing department. You won't get rich, but you probably won't regret it either.
I follow it fairly regularly. Their web site is in Chinese only but I'll give you a quick run down of what has happend over the last year with the much hyped Dragon Chip.
Basically, with commodity chips like Celerons and the various entry level priced AMD chips being so cheap the market for their chip/board combo got knocked out.
From a business perspective, and this is a business rather than a governmental agency although they've had help from academia and some grants, the original idea was to get away from the royalty costs and thereby produce a super cheap chip. But the reality of the market has been that chip royalties have become insignificant so you can't get ahead in the market by cutting royalties. There's essentially nothing left to cut at the low end.
But they're still at it.
The big thing this year was a joint venture with AMD. AMD is partnering with them on some of their chip designs that were considered industrial PC grade but are actually even better than what Haier was offering with the Dragon Chip.
And as you're probably most interested in this part, I could be recalling incorrectly, but I'm pretty sure the specs were something like a 266Mhz with 64K RAM on board and the cost was US$150 but only in units of several thousand.
You see the problem here? You can get a Via Epia 800 for less than that and those are not cheap. You can get an older Celeron or AMD chip with a motherboard for almost half that if you really shop around.
So, they're still in business, but the facts of the overall market have made their story a bit less newsworthy.
The bottom line is this: if the price is right then foreign products will be just fine.
The same is true for Microsoft. But this is where it gets interesting. Microsoft's market position is already in serious trouble when the guts of a PC go below a hundred bucks.
It's good because it is symptomatic of the real underlying issue which is that jobs of any sort are no longer necessary in the most advanced economies.
Think about it, on balance the really enormous social result of the various industrial revolutions that took place in and around the nineteenth century was the end of slavery. Slavery ended because it could, not because it should. This is true with so many things that are attributed to good will and heroic characters. That's all mythology.
This struck me the other day when someone was talking in a wide-eyed manner about all the things that would have to be done manually without industrial and agriculural machinery. The person kept using the pronoun "you" saying "you would have to do this by hand and you would have to do that by hand." I spoke up and said, no actually a slave would most likely have done most of the things you're referring to before the age of machinery.
So, if machinery and centralized power ended slavery, then IT probably will end work as we know it and this offshoring issue is really symptomatic of a huge evolution in society that is just beginning. And, of course, in the beginning the resistance will be enormous and it will still be here hundreds of years from now. In evidence I would introduce, among others, the confederate flag issue in the American South.
Slashdot Mirror
But I think the intriguing part is not the situation in Korea itself as much as the reaction to it in the US.
I just read in Business Week that the US slipped from number three --I'm pretty sure we're talking raw numbers rather than percentages-- to number ten in global broadband rankings. It's not altogether impossible that this decline is going to get worse rather than better in the near term.
And if it doesn't, if something like Wi-Max suddenly turns things around, then it could be even more interesting. Let's hope it's the latter rather than the former. But even then, there would be reprecussions for a rather large number of corporations beyond just music.
I thought this part sounded rather cool:
Atmel says SoCs from the AT91 series have already been designed into industrial automation systems, MP-3/WMA players, data acquisition products, pagers, point-of-sales terminals, medical equipment, GPS units and networking systems.
That being the case, I'd like to see a DIY project to use one of these to go with a half-height DVD player for a low cost car DVD MP3 player.
No doubt such things will eventually be cheap retail. But till then a recipe for a little DIY solder job would be cool. Besides, by the time DVD car MP3 players are cheap, the same design could probably be used for the Blu-Ray MP3 player.
They say it has USB2.0 already. So looks like a half-height DVD with a power supply in a USB case would get you pretty close. How do you get the sound out to an amp though?
Yep, I just ran memtest86 on my sister-in-law's IBM Thinkpad P4M 1700 notebook. The memory was fine but it still craps out under strain. Works fine with a linux LiveCD, but under XP running a few apps it sounds and feels just like a hair dryer and locks up tight in a few hours. The hardware isn't damaged, it's just not able to run so freakin' hot.
This is by far Via's biggest problem. I know several people looking for one and I never see them in any bricks-and-mortar hardware shops. I don't put much belief in the idea that shops are intentionally keeping them out, I think Via just doesn't realize how much demand there is in the DIY market and they're not pushing hard enough. They really need to have a little more faith in themselves and get these things out in the retail channel in a big way.
My most loved car is a '79 Toyota Celica with absolutely no power anything. The car was originally sold as a sports edition and it was considered more sporty to not have power steering since you get a better feel for the road without it. At high speed you really don't need power steering. It's for parking and such.
My understanding is that before hops, marijuana buds were used in the beer making process. You know that skunky taste? Yeah, well it used to be stronger. And the buzz, well I bet it was a good buzz.
So while we're at it let's add coca too. Now that would be an all-american brew ALA Coca Cola. Coca Beer with old fashioned skunky bud kick. Yow! It's party time.
Ah hah! .shn files and all the artwork you could possibly want. You could trade hi-def concert footage as well. You could trade whatever you wanted. Discs are outdated and if the US wants to slip behind the rest of the world, that's a pity but the rest of the world is not going to slow down and wait for it to catch up.
Well, you see this is a very interesting point in my opinion. In the country where I live, Taiwan, half of the people have this level of DSL service and it costs about twenty three dollars a month with free local phone service included.
Interestingly, we only have one Internet provider that is majority owned by the government. Actually there are sub-providers, but they all have to buy from the government monopoly. So where's the real problem for people in, say for instance, the US? The problem is they're being charged excessively for bandwidth that doesn't cost as much as they are being charged. Why is that? Hmm, could it be that companies like Warner and Sony actually own many ISPs and that the ISPs cooperate with the telecoms to lobby congress to create regulations that artificially keep the prices high? I'm pretty sure that these are the insensitive clods you are looking for.
So, you see, if bandwidth wasn't being artificially limited, you would have no problem trading
However, none of this really relates much to my original point which is that there is a big difference between music or the love and appreciation of high quality music and the music game or as they sometimes say, the industry. The latter is what this whole debate is about. It has jack shit to do with music.
This is the whole point. If you want to stick to a disc model of distribution then perhaps there is a place for the labels. But exactly why do we need to stick with a disc distribution system? I have 2Meg DSL. I can download a CD in a matter of minutes. I'm subsidizing that connection so the band can communicate with me. Bands have no business pressing discs, neither do labels. There is no need for this out-dated, expensive distribution technology when the customers themselves are already paying for the modern, efficent distribution. The distribution bill has already been paid --by the customers. Creating more costs to distribute another less efficient way is merely wasteful.
A band doesn't even need a server, they can just use P2P.
So, distribution is free. That's not the point. The point is that simply recording music and having the ability to distribute in volume isn't what the music game is really all about. In fact, it's about marketing. You know --come in here dear boy, have a cigar.
But notice I use the phrase "the music game" rather than music. Music isn't about marketing and music doesn't require enormous finances. Playing the music game is all about marketing and finance. The music game can end as far as I'm concerned.
I think this idea of the role of narration is clearly related to what you've just said.
Most novels and short stories are written from the literary perspective of a third person omniscient narrator and this is part of their charm.
I think the seduction of interactive fiction partly stems from this desire to transcend the role of the reader and ascend to the role of the omniscient narrator --to become god-like.
But this is a lot like the story in Fantasia. You may dream of incredible powers, but when you really try them on you may easily find they give you more choices than you're comfortable with.
But you see, here is the whole crux of the issue. If it really does cost next to nothing to distribute video over the Net, especially with the user subsidizing the connection, then how do you justify the prices?
You can't --well at least not without resorting to sunday school guilt tactics that might sound nice in an on-line forum but don't do shit in the real world where the average person is far too cynical. So you can't convince the consumer that it's wrong to redistribute. The only thing you can do is play the DRM game, but obviously encryption is worthless when you're sending your precious "secret" to an audiance that has no interest in preserving the secret.
Asking the consumer to pay for the bandwidth AND the content simply will not work. A more likely business model is an ISP offering free movies to keep subscribers --and considering it an honor!
Digital content is worth the cheapest media it can be printed on and I just bought a stack of DVD+Rs 4Xs for 16cents a piece. No shit.
Yeah, you're probably right. Just go for it. It's not a question of having power supplies. God, I have tons. I have a variety of simple audio amp schematics too since I've been wondering about this for a long time.
I'm tempted to just tear into it right now. But as usual I've got a stack of unfinished projects that have to come first or at least by put away before I start something new and unfortunately some of them are too big to be put away. They've just got to be finished.
I was hoping maybe somebody had tried it and had some pointers. I've had very little results googling for it. I did find that people were using battery chargers to use audio amps in the house. I thought that was rather amusing and on the more refined side there was the Black Widow DIY torrodial power supplies. I even have some nice big 500watt torroids that I considered using to do something like that. But those were more targeted at high power bass end of things. I'm thinking just lightweight midrange and tweeter drivers.
My interest has actually declined a bit since I found powered PC speakers that sounded surprisingly nice when delegated to just the high end of the frequencies that cost next to nothing. I have six of those in the corners and hidden under the desks in one room along with a big subwoofer and a pair of mid-range towers and that room sounds so freakin' good even with low bit-rate mono Mp3s.
Still, I do have all those power supplies. I think I have about fifteen of them.
Anybody have anything on this one?
I want to make an audio amp out of the parts in a PSU. It doesn't have to be super high powered and it could take purchasing an extra part or two.
Anybody have any leads?
The road train --or let's call it semi-autonomous guidance for personal land vehicles-- idea obviously has to come before the flying car.
This is the answer to all the people saying what-if there is an accident or what-if I break down. If you were part of a linked group of vehicles flying in tight formation this wouldn't be such a problem. But before we're going to see that in the air, you'd expect to see it on a road.
However, it's not necessarily that far off. The I-15 in San Diego in the section that goes to Escondido has been a testbed for this kind of technolgy for years.
Informative?!
This is blatant disinformation. You're calling the 1930s a routine recession? Well, by recent standards I guess that almost sounds reasonable.
But your attempt to shift the blame from corrupt monopolies that sank the economy to the administration that picked up the pieces is pure propoganda. Again, no surprise these days.
As a matter of fact, this is true for every machine including the simple ones like the inclined plane and the pulley. Once you stop, you're taking your chances.
This is true for the earliest steam engines. In fact, at that time it was painfully obvious. If your engine went down, it might never start again without a complete re-build. It was cheaper to keep it running around the clock than to let it go down.
This is also true for the Gigawatt steam turbogenerator on the other side of your electrical outlet. Bringing those down almost necessarily causes damage because of the phase change of steam to water. This is one of the biggest challenges for large scale solar thermal power.
This is true for your car, this is true for your blender, this is true for your drill and your circular saw. This is true for every machine. This is true for the sun itself. Try re-booting that sucker.
But as we can see from some of these latter examples, some machines aren't designed to run continuously because they are crafted in a manner that allows them to finish a job in a relatively short period. A blender is an example of a machine that can probably still be considered an acceptable design if it cannot run for more than ten minutes without overheating. It is reasonable that a minute or so should be enough to blend most ingredients, so a limitation on run time is quite acceptable in such a case. So, you need to look at the context in which the device is used before you simply say that the design is fucked. It's a given that all machines ideally work better when in continuous use, but there are cases where you can make trade-offs.
A PC, is not one of them. If your PC gets too hot to leave on. You have a fucked design. That's not to say that no computing device should ever be allowed to get hot. But the key here is "PC" which stands for personal computer. From a design perspective, a personal computer that becomes too hot to leave running continuously or consumes to much electricity or requires a cooling system that produces too much waste heat or noise to be used in a personal setting should be considered a poorly designed personal computer.
So, in this sense I would argue that the entire P4 design is fatally flawed. As a matter of fact, the Taiwanese board manufacturers were complaining about this fact at this year's Computex in Taipei. This was supposed to be they year of the miniature form factor, low-power PC. But the rumor was that Intel had threatened to cut ties to companies who didn't front their boards with Intel P4 chipsets which were everywhere.
I don't know. He seemed to avoid the issues presnted to him in a couple of places.
This question:
How do you enforce rights in an ownership society? (Score:5, Interesting) by zzyzx
Was right to the heart of things and well placed as just a few questions ahead Badnarik had just spoken rather ambiguously about his position on copyright.
Badnarik went from saying it was too early to say what was right in the copyright game to switching around and talking about how important intellectual property was comparing it to the importance of real property as though the latter was a minor point in comparison. Then, to top it off, instead of addressing this glaring issue about how a Libertarian government would protect free speech, he trails off talking about how the market will take care of it. Huh?
Then a few questions later he says that literacy in the US has declined dramatically since the nineteenth century. Wow. I wonder where he got that statistic. Whodda thunk?
People keep looking for a cause for the problems with IT which is generally taken as a synonym for technology. But there is no cause to discover because it's not that something has happened, it is more that something happened and now it is over and what is being sought as a cause is actually nothing but an absence.
The absence, in turn, is nothing but the end of grand business opportunity that was akin to the development of the high volume press at the end of the nineteenth century --the CMOS process. And, the observant will note that in fact CMOS literally is a form of printing so this analogy is quite intriguing.
The whole Moore's law thing was more of a business law than anything else and now it is winding down after an incredible run. That's the cause of almost all the problems in IT and the technology that IT serves as a proxy for. It's hardly mysterious where the problems come from, but knowing the cause does not suggest any solution.
Well, this is again the chicken and egg thing.
There is such a thing as carbon sequestration. The problem there is not that it's necessarily dangerous or harmful to the environment. After all, plants are a form of carbon sequestration. There are limitless variations on the theme.
The trick is that if your only source of useable energy is hydrocarbons, you can't easily get ahead releasing them as a gas just in order to put them back in some solid form.
But that limitation only exists when hydrocarbons are the only source of useable energy. Once there are alternatives in place that rival the scale of hydrocarbons, the carbon issue isn't such a problem. Other emissions like nitrous oxides and sulfur can also be controlled. So, it's not really that hydrocarbons are evil; it's more that over reliance on one type of resource naturally leads to problems.
It might make sense to have a few large locations dedicated to sequestrations relying on something like terrestrial thermal or orbital solar and continuing to use hydrocarbons for things like vehicles. Or geothermal is another interesting option. I think solar thermal and geothermal are by far the most underestimated large-scale energy sources that are available in the here and now.
As for platinum, well again it's all such a chicken and egg issue. If we had cheap access to space we could probably harvest precious metals in bulk from the asteroid belt making them no longer precious on earth and allowing for cheap fuel cells. But of course if we had cheap access to space we could just put up solar satellites and get electricity directly from there.
And speaking of space, that's where we see the best evidence that hydrocarbons are created by planets devoid of life. So, there's likely a nearly endless supply of hydrocarbons within the Earth itself which will eventually make the existing worries about non-renewable resources seem ridiculous since they're probably all renewable.
But the point, of course, is cost. And here is where this story is quite impressive.
I'm not a pessimist about technology, but I'm disappointed in what has passed for technology since, say the 1960s. As they say --where's the flying cars damnit? It was supposed to be like radio, black and white TV, color TV, high speed Internet, holographic immersion, direct neural interface and beyond already. It's 2004! What happened? It's practically the same as the seventies.
You know, when the iMac counts as a technological breakthrough things are slow. No offense to the Mac lovers, but it was more of a design breaktrhough than anything. That's just one of many examples of that same thing where it's a new style as opposed to a radically new technology. Cars get this treatment all the time. The differnce between the new model and the old model is the freakin' plastic brake light reflectors. That's not an advance. That sucks.
The Internet itself is another example. Just because a series of factors made it seem to emerge suddenly, it isn't really the case that it happened suddenly at all. Mostly it was just a matter of merging rather dated defence research into the private sector. Same with a lot of chip designs. It's not really all that amazing or recent. It just took a long time to make it your way.
And as for CMOS process tecnologies and the whole Moore's Law thing. Give me a break, that was not and is not really about pusing the edge of technology as much as it was about markets being controlled by only a few players being able to afford to compete.
Immersion lithography which is part of what is making China so hot was experimented with decades ago and abandoned because it didn't fit the business plans of the likes of Intel or IBM at the time.
So, when I see this stuff about China being the new "technology research hotbed" it doesn't strike me as being all that meaningful. It's the new manufacturing center for chips. So what.
I mean besides CMOS chip technology which is already very, very mature its hard to point to real major technology that has been developed in the last forty years with any serious economic significance. Okay lasers, though for the most part just the small ones, have improved a lot and small motors are more reliable. Anything outside of IT though? Even MEMS is still mostly about IT. There's promises about ultra efficient fuel cells and nanotubes and such but there were promises forty years ago as well. They even had better promises back then. We're still building houses out of wooden sticks for crying out loud.
Technology outside of IT moves unbelievably slowly.
So, if China is where the chips are going to be made then naturally you'll have a lot of designers there making consumer products, but is that really a technology research hotbed? I'd call it more like a designer extravaganza.
I do hope it could be otherwise, but I don't know. Something tells me we're still going to have internal combustion autos a hundred years from now.
However, like I said, I'm not a pessimist. I think the revenge we will get is that we'll live incredibly long lives so we will eventually see the flying cars, space elevators and what-not. We'll just have to be very patient. All I expect out of China is cheaper PCs. As if they weren't cheap already.
In fact, Chinese versions of Office have been very difficult for Open Office. As of 1.1 there have been many improvements, but people got burned early on and this really hurt the effort.
The Chinese language is an interesting battleground in Open Source, especially when it comes to productivity apps since a localized desktop isn't really that different from the western version once you get the key-in system set up. An office suite, on the other hand, is quite different between English and Chinese. Once you start getting into fancy fonts and positioning, it gets a bit hectic since Chinese can be written in all sorts of ways on the page and typically inculdes both Chinese and western writing and punctuation. From what I've seen, it's the shift between single byte western punctuation and double byte Chinese punctuation that can cause a lot of problems with erroneous characters and messed up formatting.
One of the interesting issues here is that the simpified Mainland Chinese tends to be further along than Traditional Chinese used in Taiwan. This is a bit of a reversal of what happened in closed source. Initially, back in the DOS and earlier days, Taiwan was far ahead of the mainland with a word processor suite called ET3 named after the company that had developed the font set and key-in system-- Eten. Eventually, their tech was bought up by Microsoft as well and was eventually included in the unicode standard.
But in Open Source things change, especially politically.
Although Taiwan has Linux User groups, it's surprising how few people are willing to consider Open Source as an option given the prevalence of tech in the society. In many cases, there is a fear that if Microsoft slips the local economy will do so as well. But since the local economy is all about hardware, this seems a bit odd. They have the most to gain. It's a very conservative society in many ways though and especially when it comes to business, so it's not that surprising. If it aint broke, don't fix it. They just aren't seeing that it is broke and they will benefit more than anybody by getting it fixed.
But yeah, there are still issues with Chinese compared to Office and this is a major battleground where a lot of the soldiers are hesitant to fight out of a false sense of allegiance.
This isn't so unusual though.
Let's look at the drug war in which the conventional liberal position is that the government needs to back off.
It's not as though liberals are inherently Stallinists obsessed with controlling everyone with a huge government bureaucracy. That sort of assumption which he seems to imply is a great disservice to liberals.
Liberals are all for individual rights, you know like as in the word "liberty." It's surprising how difficult this very simple and obvious connection is for many people.
But I'm pleased in a way. I have an MA in Composition and Rhetoric and one of my many jobs is grading GRE practice essays. I did about fifty this afternoon in fact. See, that's why I'm a /. junky. Essays and arguments are my life's blood.
However, I'd like to point something out to the author and it's something I see a lot of which is a misperception regarding what students are writing about in school.
Especially when people think about testing they assume that essay topics are completely inane. Well perhaps this has been true in the past, but these days I see many essay topics that do focus on very broad personal issues and encourage the students to explore things using any creativity they can come up with. So the problem that he's discussing in his essay is somewhat contrived. In fact, students are encouraged to write about unusal, quirky and personal issues even in test settings. Not only that, but some of them come up with some really beautiful work even in the constrained environment of a test session. There are limits, but it's really not that bad.
I'm trying to think of an example. Here, today I had some that were on the topic of living through a difficult experience. That's a very general topic that refers you specifically into your own personal life. I read some real beauties. Actually that wasn't GRE though. That was another class. I had a bunch of GMAT today, but that's another story as well. Those are fun in a different way.
Anyhow, it's really not so bad and I always teach the students that if you get a lousy topic you can usually write your way around it.
My MA was in Comp, but as an undergrad I did Creative Writing. Any MFAs in the house? Losers!
There's no way you can tell me that these kinds of writing courses make writing boring. If anything they can get too edgey. We used to have all kinds of hardcore sexual stuff written about other people in the class and it was like who's going to say when? I guess it depends where you go to school.
Well, I'm rambling at 4:50Am so let me just close up with this bit of writing advice. If you want to have good time as a writing major try San Diego State. They've got a sweet writing department. You won't get rich, but you probably won't regret it either.
I follow it fairly regularly. Their web site is in Chinese only but I'll give you a quick run down of what has happend over the last year with the much hyped Dragon Chip.
Basically, with commodity chips like Celerons and the various entry level priced AMD chips being so cheap the market for their chip/board combo got knocked out.
From a business perspective, and this is a business rather than a governmental agency although they've had help from academia and some grants, the original idea was to get away from the royalty costs and thereby produce a super cheap chip. But the reality of the market has been that chip royalties have become insignificant so you can't get ahead in the market by cutting royalties. There's essentially nothing left to cut at the low end.
But they're still at it.
The big thing this year was a joint venture with AMD. AMD is partnering with them on some of their chip designs that were considered industrial PC grade but are actually even better than what Haier was offering with the Dragon Chip.
And as you're probably most interested in this part, I could be recalling incorrectly, but I'm pretty sure the specs were something like a 266Mhz with 64K RAM on board and the cost was US$150 but only in units of several thousand.
You see the problem here? You can get a Via Epia 800 for less than that and those are not cheap. You can get an older Celeron or AMD chip with a motherboard for almost half that if you really shop around.
So, they're still in business, but the facts of the overall market have made their story a bit less newsworthy.
The bottom line is this: if the price is right then foreign products will be just fine.
The same is true for Microsoft. But this is where it gets interesting. Microsoft's market position is already in serious trouble when the guts of a PC go below a hundred bucks.
It's good because it is symptomatic of the real underlying issue which is that jobs of any sort are no longer necessary in the most advanced economies.
Think about it, on balance the really enormous social result of the various industrial revolutions that took place in and around the nineteenth century was the end of slavery. Slavery ended because it could, not because it should. This is true with so many things that are attributed to good will and heroic characters. That's all mythology.
This struck me the other day when someone was talking in a wide-eyed manner about all the things that would have to be done manually without industrial and agriculural machinery. The person kept using the pronoun "you" saying "you would have to do this by hand and you would have to do that by hand." I spoke up and said, no actually a slave would most likely have done most of the things you're referring to before the age of machinery.
So, if machinery and centralized power ended slavery, then IT probably will end work as we know it and this offshoring issue is really symptomatic of a huge evolution in society that is just beginning. And, of course, in the beginning the resistance will be enormous and it will still be here hundreds of years from now. In evidence I would introduce, among others, the confederate flag issue in the American South.