Why is it so hard to conceive of individuals as little self-owned businesses with valuable services to provide to employers at mutually negotiated prices? And let the market decide which way the prices go. After all, capitalism is all about free markets, right? And labor is another market. Regulated, like most markets, but still a market, nonetheless. I have seen many business people who tout free market economics when it benefits them and then with straight faces denounce the workings of the labor market when it swings in favor of the worker.
Yes, but the rate of our employment is more than the money used to pay your salary (although most people consider it the only variable). The control of having you at a certain place at a certain time is more important to more employers than your ability to work (unless you are phenomenally good at what you do, but then you probably are living your life like in the free market as you describe, but due to reputation).
Most jobs are not that hard. Employers want the skill levels to complete a job to be the minimum required to complete the task, since this reduces risk to them by allowing them to plug a new person into your position and keep the corporate machine going. Managers are the SysOps of the business world, and when the market swings over to support the worker (due to lack lf supply generally), the manager would rather look to increase the supply of the limited resource rather than pay for the increased cost over the long term). Hence the move to higher level languages in programming; they're easier to write with and hardware is cheaper than people. Hence a reduction of programming 'stars' or 'gurus' and enter a flock of cheap workers capable of 'doing the job' (although generally not as well as the people they replaced) for a cheaper price that are much easier to replace.
They're also looking to move up in their social position through a better job and higher pay, and thus, are more willing to work under the conditions they are used, which could is generally described as 'wage slavery'. They are used to standing in line and doing what they are told to the best of the abilities they have; not everyone gets 90%+ in their school and studies yet the world seems to keeps turning and it hasn't come to an end yet. They come in, take the job with *less* restrictions than the one they had before (try working a minimum wage job and see how free you are at your place of employment) and are happy to take the work of the person that is demanding a fair 'work/life' balance and 'flexible hours', usually for a lower price as well since they are used to getting paid far less with more control. Think of moving up in jobs as a voluntary Indentured Servitude, and there's always someone there to take your position if decide that the restrictions of your new found 'freedoms' are too much for you now.
Hence, the market works, just not in your favour.
The reduction in the employment of exceptional people is inevitable for tasks which once required them, mostly in part to the exceptional people developing tools for themselves to make their jobs easier. It eventually reaches a point that non-exceptionals can do it to. We have written ourselves out of our jobs, at least in the field of programing. Whether this is good or not is left to be decided, but that's how the managers want it and they control the dollars. Free markets don't always work, especially when they're being controlled by people with selfish interests.
Each of the above commands could be simple one line scripts that encapsulate the required utilities (which in this example would be ImageMagick or netpbm calls). You can also distribute the processing over a cluster using rsh or ssh quite easily, with the pipe'd data flowing over the network connections...
Unix gave us the solution for parallel programming over 30 years ago (at least for certain types of high computational batch processing operations) and the wheel keeps getting reinvented over and over and over again. By learning a bit of shell script you can easily take advantage of the 4+ core CPUs that are coming out in the future without installing other than a linux distribution.
It would be nice if someone bought some for a change. There's a few videos I've made for various albums, and, to stay on topic, mny remix of "me i'm not" that I wrote using the multi-track sources Trent released for his new album (which I think, personally, is his best work in years).
Of course, no one has really ever stolen my music, since I tend to give it away, following the 'try before you buy' approach that is preached around here. I just think that you can't steal what I give away, but sometimes it's nice to get something back to continue along with all the work that I've done over the years to make my albums, writing and artwork.
Of course, one can alway just make a donation or buy some merchandise if they want to support the cause as well. I've been on this site for years and follow it's practices well...unfortunately it doesn't seem to pay, or not at least yet.
I hear most my work is quite good, maybe you might think so too.
I've been using linux for music production for over 5 years, have produced about 5 albums and EP's and am starting to get into scoring films. The Linux audio domain has shown a huge amount of improvement over that time. Ardour has evolved from a crash-happy hair-tearer to a stable recording and mixing package. The number of sound editors out there is astounding and each has their own strengths and weaknesses that you can exploit. But then there's the command line, which let's you do things like this:
for i in *.wav; do out=${i/.wav/_mono.wav}; sox $i -r 44100 -b -c 1 $out; normalize $i; done
which will convert all samples in the current directory to mono and normalize them in no time at all.
The amount of audio software for linux is astounding, from programmer synths/sequencers like ChucK, Common Lisp Music, and CSound, to modular synths like Alsa Modular, PD and the super powerful keykit (the Emacs of MIDI sequencers). There are command line sound mushers and generators, mixers and so many effects it's hard to know where to start. But there really are no limits, if you're willing to put in the time and learn the system and how to tie everything together...
As a side note, I volunteered to help setup a new Pro-Tools setup at the local Film Pool, and after a week of trying to get all the licences in order, I wondered why anybody would pay for it at all. That was my first time using Pro-Tools for real, and it was just astounding that *every* (extra) plugin had to be registered, you still had version compatibility hell (could only use this driver with this version of PT, etc) and even after a week the system still didn't work right. After using Pro-Tools I'd take Ardour any day, if only for the lack of registration hell (which an audio engineer friend of mine teaches a day long course in; not how to use Pro-Tools, just how to register it!) and the massive amounts of high quality, free LADSPA plugins that are available.
Right now, Gentoo is my distro of choice and it has a huge amount of audio apps in portage as well as a Pro Audio overlay that's available through layman. Needless to say, I would concur that Linux is ready for the audio desktop workstation market, and has been for some time.
The only thing that linux is lacking is "instant gratification" music apps (although the playfield is getting better with LMMS and such programs). The tools available take some time to learn, but that's also half the fun of it, since once you learn the basics a whole new world opens up as you learn more and more about what's available. Jumping in takes a while to learn how to swim, but the only limits on how far you go depends on the amount of time you put in...
I think every beginning programmer should have to spend a semester on some funky old z80, for instance, all in assembler, debugging in machine language, before they can call themselves a good programmer. The idea is not to get them skilled in z80s, but to give them a basic idea of how computers work.
Or better yet, get one of the many freely available Gameboy emulators out there and the programming docs and write a game. I did that and it got me a job where I wrote 2 games for the Gameboy and Gameboy Color. There's nothing like writing a 16.8 fixed point 3d collision detection system in 8 bit assembly...
Actually, the taxes levies go to SOCAN and are then distributed to the artists directly through royalty payments based on radio and tv broadcast statistics.
Run a couple of 'beep' tests to find the latency and attenuation of the output sound as compared to it's return into the system through the microphone. Scale the output waveform by the attenuation and offset by the latency time and subtract that from the incoming waveform and that should cancel a lot of the outgoing signal enough to disable the speech recognition. Not too much computation, but then again I haven't tested and it's off the top of my head....
This can be foiled by 'encrypting' the key by swapping the bytes and using a bit of assembly to 'decrypt' the key in a register before use and making sure the key never leaves the register at any time. Not really encryption I know, but it's not difficult (if you know the arcane art of assemly) to foil this type of attack.
I think he meant 'tubes' like the old fashioned air driven tube messaging systems like they used to have in offices and factories (and I think I saw one in Costco a while back for the cashiers to transfer cash to the back of the store). This makes the most sense to me, since the system was essentially email-like, and would be the closest thing that someone with limited technical knowledge talking to an older crowd could analogize to.
Re:wow, I have no idea what that just meant!
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Well, they all *look* the same;-) Yes, if you want to get into semantics, vocabulary and other language lawyer topics they are massive differences in each and every dialect of Lisp, but they all follow the same essence of lists and cons cells and the other axioms that make any lisp a LISP. See The Roots of Lisp by Paul Graham for a better writeup of what John McCarthy discovered when he 'found' (rather than discovered) Lisp.
Re:wow, I have no idea what that just meant!
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Yes, Fortran is older as a compiled language, but I was referring to high level as meaning automatic memory management, garbage collection and such, which are synonomous with high level languages of today (aka 4GLs).
Re:wow, I have no idea what that just meant!
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Lisp is the oldest, still in use, high level programming that exists today. It's the core of emacs, and was standardized into Common Lisp in the early 90's. It basically has no syntax other than words and nested parenthesis (():-), has an extrememly powerful macro system, and a loyal following of elders that hang out in comp.lang.lisp on usenet. As well, the great Emacs is basically a lisp interpreter (or Operating System) that happens to have a text editor above it.
Smalltalk is another high level language where everything is an object. It has syntax, supports many interesting high level concepts like persistance, and has some nice development environments and pseudo OS projects, one of which is called Squeak.
Ruby is a newer high level language from Japan, that was designed to combine the high level concepts of Lisp, but added some syntax to reduce code verbosity and increase expressiveness. The Lispnicks say this is unnecessary complexity that reduces the power of the language; people that were raised on languages with syntax find the expressiveness more familiar, easy to use and powerful.
This type of activity has been happening to celebs and famous/known people since the dawn of time. Now, finally, everyone gets their chance to to be under the microscope and judged, so things can go two ways: people stop doing anything for fear of ridicule, or people are more accepting of other people's activities.
Although I don't like it, I suspect that people will just stop doing anything, since the acceptance of others seems beyond the capabilities of the majority of society.
Since flash is so great for laptop HDs, why not get a small flash memory card to serve as the HD instead of that whole shebang? For example, why not mount the root and user partition on a small 2GB flash card,
I managed to get this type of setup working on my laptop a year or two ago using a 1G flash card and a PCMCIA adapter and it wasn't terribly difficult. The laptop was for audio work and performance, and the noise from the seeks on my harddrive tended to be a bit loud when amplified by a club theater system, so I figured this would solve some of the problem. The only real pain was the ancient PCMCIA IDE driver (marked obsolete even then) which required some of the pcmcia-utils, which I had to bundle into an initrd so the root device could be present for mounting after the kernel was booted (no autodetection by the kernel, which is one of the big problems I have with userspace driver helpers).
After I managed to get it working I contacted a magazine (Linux Journal maybe?) about writing an article on how I did it, and the response was 'Why would anybody want to do that?'. I guess I was just a couple of years too early...again...
This can really be a way of 'taxing the rich to help the poor' on a bandwidth scale, which seems great to the poor, but my be opposed by the rich if they catch wind of it.../me donates his $0.02
Interesting. I never thought my choice my of license would effect much other than what people would use my tracks for. I would think that people that care about such things are in the low minority, but I will take that into consideration in the future.
ps. I think you're referring to my philomath ep's license, and to be honest, I just picked one that I thought would keep people from just pressing cd's of my music and selling them without my knowledge. I guess if I had written an OS app I wouldn't care about it being on a distro CD (honored actually), so I guess I should take those ideas a bit further with my compositions.
But I know a number of professional artists, from bands that are fairly well-known and have done national and international tours, and they make middle-class salaries.
True, I've talked to some of the guys from Sloan (a pretty decent sized, long running band here in Candada) a couple of times, and on thing I asked was "So, what's it like being a rocktar?". The reply: "It's a job. The best job in the world, but it's a job.". Just because you're famous, that doesn't make you rich, but some people manage to make a living at it.
Slashdot Mirror
rim.jobs
Care to define CAS and LL/SC?
/tmp has always been for data that is not to survive reboots. /var has always been for data that *is* to survive across reboots.
That's how it's always been in Unix land.
kung fu.
;-)
duh.
Yes, but the rate of our employment is more than the money used to pay your salary (although most people consider it the only variable). The control of having you at a certain place at a certain time is more important to more employers than your ability to work (unless you are phenomenally good at what you do, but then you probably are living your life like in the free market as you describe, but due to reputation).
Most jobs are not that hard. Employers want the skill levels to complete a job to be the minimum required to complete the task, since this reduces risk to them by allowing them to plug a new person into your position and keep the corporate machine going. Managers are the SysOps of the business world, and when the market swings over to support the worker (due to lack lf supply generally), the manager would rather look to increase the supply of the limited resource rather than pay for the increased cost over the long term). Hence the move to higher level languages in programming; they're easier to write with and hardware is cheaper than people. Hence a reduction of programming 'stars' or 'gurus' and enter a flock of cheap workers capable of 'doing the job' (although generally not as well as the people they replaced) for a cheaper price that are much easier to replace.
They're also looking to move up in their social position through a better job and higher pay, and thus, are more willing to work under the conditions they are used, which could is generally described as 'wage slavery'. They are used to standing in line and doing what they are told to the best of the abilities they have; not everyone gets 90%+ in their school and studies yet the world seems to keeps turning and it hasn't come to an end yet. They come in, take the job with *less* restrictions than the one they had before (try working a minimum wage job and see how free you are at your place of employment) and are happy to take the work of the person that is demanding a fair 'work/life' balance and 'flexible hours', usually for a lower price as well since they are used to getting paid far less with more control. Think of moving up in jobs as a voluntary Indentured Servitude, and there's always someone there to take your position if decide that the restrictions of your new found 'freedoms' are too much for you now.
Hence, the market works, just not in your favour.
The reduction in the employment of exceptional people is inevitable for tasks which once required them, mostly in part to the exceptional people developing tools for themselves to make their jobs easier. It eventually reaches a point that non-exceptionals can do it to. We have written ourselves out of our jobs, at least in the field of programing. Whether this is good or not is left to be decided, but that's how the managers want it and they control the dollars. Free markets don't always work, especially when they're being controlled by people with selfish interests.
Here's a simple example on how to get a video rendering distributed over 4 processors from a single command line:
capture-frame | scale-and-adjust-brightness | apply-effects | compress-to-jpeg > frame-00001.jpg
Each of the above commands could be simple one line scripts that encapsulate the required utilities (which in this example would be ImageMagick or netpbm calls). You can also distribute the processing over a cluster using rsh or ssh quite easily, with the pipe'd data flowing over the network connections...
Unix gave us the solution for parallel programming over 30 years ago (at least for certain types of high computational batch processing operations) and the wheel keeps getting reinvented over and over and over again. By learning a bit of shell script you can easily take advantage of the 4+ core CPUs that are coming out in the future without installing other than a linux distribution.
It would be nice if someone bought some for a change. There's a few videos I've made for various albums, and, to stay on topic, mny remix of "me i'm not" that I wrote using the multi-track sources Trent released for his new album (which I think, personally, is his best work in years).
Of course, no one has really ever stolen my music, since I tend to give it away, following the 'try before you buy' approach that is preached around here. I just think that you can't steal what I give away, but sometimes it's nice to get something back to continue along with all the work that I've done over the years to make my albums, writing and artwork.
Of course, one can alway just make a donation or buy some merchandise if they want to support the cause as well. I've been on this site for years and follow it's practices well...unfortunately it doesn't seem to pay, or not at least yet.
I hear most my work is quite good, maybe you might think so too.
But, "Do Dice Play God?"...
...we won't work for them anymore.
I've been using linux for music production for over 5 years, have produced about 5 albums and EP's and am starting to get into scoring films. The Linux audio domain has shown a huge amount of improvement over that time. Ardour has evolved from a crash-happy hair-tearer to a stable recording and mixing package. The number of sound editors out there is astounding and each has their own strengths and weaknesses that you can exploit. But then there's the command line, which let's you do things like this:
for i in *.wav; do out=${i/.wav/_mono.wav}; sox $i -r 44100 -b -c 1 $out; normalize $i; done
which will convert all samples in the current directory to mono and normalize them in no time at all.
The amount of audio software for linux is astounding, from programmer synths/sequencers like ChucK, Common Lisp Music, and CSound, to modular synths like Alsa Modular, PD and the super powerful keykit (the Emacs of MIDI sequencers). There are command line sound mushers and generators, mixers and so many effects it's hard to know where to start. But there really are no limits, if you're willing to put in the time and learn the system and how to tie everything together...
As a side note, I volunteered to help setup a new Pro-Tools setup at the local Film Pool, and after a week of trying to get all the licences in order, I wondered why anybody would pay for it at all. That was my first time using Pro-Tools for real, and it was just astounding that *every* (extra) plugin had to be registered, you still had version compatibility hell (could only use this driver with this version of PT, etc) and even after a week the system still didn't work right. After using Pro-Tools I'd take Ardour any day, if only for the lack of registration hell (which an audio engineer friend of mine teaches a day long course in; not how to use Pro-Tools, just how to register it!) and the massive amounts of high quality, free LADSPA plugins that are available.
Right now, Gentoo is my distro of choice and it has a huge amount of audio apps in portage as well as a Pro Audio overlay that's available through layman. Needless to say, I would concur that Linux is ready for the audio desktop workstation market, and has been for some time.
The only thing that linux is lacking is "instant gratification" music apps (although the playfield is getting better with LMMS and such programs). The tools available take some time to learn, but that's also half the fun of it, since once you learn the basics a whole new world opens up as you learn more and more about what's available. Jumping in takes a while to learn how to swim, but the only limits on how far you go depends on the amount of time you put in...
Or better yet, get one of the many freely available Gameboy emulators out there and the programming docs and write a game. I did that and it got me a job where I wrote 2 games for the Gameboy and Gameboy Color. There's nothing like writing a 16.8 fixed point 3d collision detection system in 8 bit assembly...
Actually, the taxes levies go to SOCAN and are then distributed to the artists directly through royalty payments based on radio and tv broadcast statistics.
Run a couple of 'beep' tests to find the latency and attenuation of the output sound as compared to it's return into the system through the microphone. Scale the output waveform by the attenuation and offset by the latency time and subtract that from the incoming waveform and that should cancel a lot of the outgoing signal enough to disable the speech recognition. Not too much computation, but then again I haven't tested and it's off the top of my head....
This can be foiled by 'encrypting' the key by swapping the bytes and using a bit of assembly to 'decrypt' the key in a register before use and making sure the key never leaves the register at any time. Not really encryption I know, but it's not difficult (if you know the arcane art of assemly) to foil this type of attack.
...correlation won't mean causation in this case. Or any case, in the case of an article like this showing up on /.
Just a hunch, but hey, what would I know?
Is there an echo in here?
Nope, but I'm kinda old fashioned...
I think he meant 'tubes' like the old fashioned air driven tube messaging systems like they used to have in offices and factories (and I think I saw one in Costco a while back for the cashiers to transfer cash to the back of the store). This makes the most sense to me, since the system was essentially email-like, and would be the closest thing that someone with limited technical knowledge talking to an older crowd could analogize to.
Well, they all *look* the same ;-) Yes, if you want to get into semantics, vocabulary and other language lawyer topics they are massive differences in each and every dialect of Lisp, but they all follow the same essence of lists and cons cells and the other axioms that make any lisp a LISP. See The Roots of Lisp by Paul Graham for a better writeup of what John McCarthy discovered when he 'found' (rather than discovered) Lisp.
Yes, Fortran is older as a compiled language, but I was referring to high level as meaning automatic memory management, garbage collection and such, which are synonomous with high level languages of today (aka 4GLs).
Lisp is the oldest, still in use, high level programming that exists today. It's the core of emacs, and was standardized into Common Lisp in the early 90's. It basically has no syntax other than words and nested parenthesis (() :-), has an extrememly powerful macro system, and a loyal following of elders that hang out in comp.lang.lisp on usenet. As well, the great Emacs is basically a lisp interpreter (or Operating System) that happens to have a text editor above it.
Smalltalk is another high level language where everything is an object. It has syntax, supports many interesting high level concepts like persistance, and has some nice development environments and pseudo OS projects, one of which is called Squeak.
Ruby is a newer high level language from Japan, that was designed to combine the high level concepts of Lisp, but added some syntax to reduce code verbosity and increase expressiveness. The Lispnicks say this is unnecessary complexity that reduces the power of the language; people that were raised on languages with syntax find the expressiveness more familiar, easy to use and powerful.
I'm still undecided.
This type of activity has been happening to celebs and famous/known people since the dawn of time. Now, finally, everyone gets their chance to to be under the microscope and judged, so things can go two ways: people stop doing anything for fear of ridicule, or people are more accepting of other people's activities.
Although I don't like it, I suspect that people will just stop doing anything, since the acceptance of others seems beyond the capabilities of the majority of society.
I managed to get this type of setup working on my laptop a year or two ago using a 1G flash card and a PCMCIA adapter and it wasn't terribly difficult. The laptop was for audio work and performance, and the noise from the seeks on my harddrive tended to be a bit loud when amplified by a club theater system, so I figured this would solve some of the problem. The only real pain was the ancient PCMCIA IDE driver (marked obsolete even then) which required some of the pcmcia-utils, which I had to bundle into an initrd so the root device could be present for mounting after the kernel was booted (no autodetection by the kernel, which is one of the big problems I have with userspace driver helpers).
After I managed to get it working I contacted a magazine (Linux Journal maybe?) about writing an article on how I did it, and the response was 'Why would anybody want to do that?'. I guess I was just a couple of years too early...again...
This can really be a way of 'taxing the rich to help the poor' on a bandwidth scale, which seems great to the poor, but my be opposed by the rich if they catch wind of it... /me donates his $0.02
Interesting. I never thought my choice my of license would effect much other than what people would use my tracks for. I would think that people that care about such things are in the low minority, but I will take that into consideration in the future.
ps. I think you're referring to my philomath ep's license, and to be honest, I just picked one that I thought would keep people from just pressing cd's of my music and selling them without my knowledge. I guess if I had written an OS app I wouldn't care about it being on a distro CD (honored actually), so I guess I should take those ideas a bit further with my compositions.