... is this had been Joe Schmoe@anyISP.net he'd have probably had to fight a lot harder to keep his net.access than the University did. Whatever happened to the idea of innocent until proven guilty? They're not even listening to the files to make sure that they are actually ones they own.
Right now, I'm not sure the problem justifies a new infrastructure - but the day the government starts taxing e-mail, it'll be time to start a new one.
... and to fight, as the old saying goes. My observation, as a former alt.flamer, Meower and veteran of the alt.life.sucks/Skippy/HipCrime wars is that for every clueless newbie, there is a self-righteous experienced idiot who will burn a newsgroup down to the ground around him in flames rather than just use a killfile, sit on his hands and ignore the wretches. And before you blame troll sources such as Meow or "Aol'ers" or "Altopia posters" or "Web TV'ers", note that most of the flame wars I've read in various newsgroups are not newbies or trolls vs newsgroup regulars, it's interior faction X vs interior faction Y.
The mechanics of how these things work is interesting -
1. Poster A has been posting in alt.* for a good long time.
2. Poster B posts a flame, a troll, or just an unpopular opinion that Poster A objects to, in flaming language.
3. Escalation.
4. Poster A becomes a net.lawyer and net.cop and attempts to first, convince Poster B that he is "off-topic", abusive, or not part of the "community" and attempts to cut off B's net.access by complaint letters to B's ISP.
5. a)This often fails, in which case B finds out about it and the entire controversy continues to fester, with charges and countercharges of censorship and "law" breaking. b) It succeeds and B either learns a lesson - or gets a more secure account from netcopping and proceeds to start a personal vendetta against A.
The results are predictable - useful discussion decreases and noise increases.
Web boards, strangely enough, don't have this problem as much - seeing as it's one or a few people responsible for admitting people into the site, rules and enforcement tend to be more clear cut and not as controversial and varied - Slashdot, for example, isn't dependent on whether ISP X has a looser TOS than ISP Y. Furthermore, it's up to the administrators, not any Tom, Dick or Harry who wants to send a complaint E-mail to the offender's ISP. No one, even if they've been at a web board for X years is under the illusion that it's "their" webboard and they have the right to "enforce" their personal interpretation of rules.
In short, it's not just trolls and newbies that have impacted Usenet negatively - it's also the self-righteous and the intolerant.
... is not just due to piracy, although it certainly has something to do with it. Just what kind of pop music tradition, not to mention alternative music tradition, did China have in the 1960's? The answer is, none at all. The government controlled all expression and pop music was considered Western and bourgeous. Anyone who wanted to listen to it HAD to pirate it on smuggled cassette tapes and they were taking a chance of getting caught. In short - it's not a case of an already established record industry being destroyed by record piracy - it's a case of a new record industry trying to make its way in a culture where record piracy was the only way to distribute music. Of course, they're going to have a great deal of trouble establishing themselves in that situation.
Saying that China's current state of the industry is our future state of the industry is comparing apples and oranges. We have thousands of bands who perform without any kind of corporate sponsorship at all, or even record contracts - it's a well established network of enterprise, one that extreme piracy would not eliminate. China has nothing like this and it's not going to be built up in a few short years. The music industry in China has a long, uphill battle - the music industry in America is facing a long, slow downhill slide. Quite a difference.
Clearly, if they started arresting the victims of crime, crime would instantly stop as all the victims would be in jail and safe from the criminals out roaming the streets. It's just another example of how the online world is showing society new and innovative ways to solve serious problems.
... competition from other forms of entertainment such as video games and DVDs.
e) The overall decline in importance of music in our culture - it's just not as central to popular culture now as it was in the 60s.
Actually, as a musical medium, AM *was* killed off by FM in the late 70s. How many AM stations are there left that play music?
And then all radio died, killed off by television.
Actually, that happened before. Stars like Jack Benny, Mirton Berle, and George Burns and shows like the Lone Ranger, soap operas, Sam and Margie, drama and variety evaporated from the AM dial in the early 50's as TV took over. Music then reigned until FM came along.
Movies and TV will be killed off by virtual reality adventures. Books will be killed off by general illiteracy. And we'll be killed off by cockroaches.
24-track digital multi-track recorder($3,500) ; 40-channel mixer/sound board($6,000) ; studio musicians ($???/hour) ; booth construction (ca. $10,000) ; sundries such as cables, media, beer, etc. ($1,000)
Wow, I wonder how the Beatles ever managed with their amateur 4 and 8 track equipment.
How good do you think that Pink Floyd album of yours would have sounded if it had been recorded in a garage using bicycle spokes and wooden spoons for the synthesized sound?
Um, just like Piper at the Gates of Dawn? See "The Scarecrow" for the wooden spoons and "Bike" for the bicycle sounds.
If you think for a moment that a person can't come up with a professional level recording using a home computer setup and a few inexpensive extras, then you just don't know what you're talking about. As a matter of fact, there is plenty of contemporary music produced in the kind of studios you describe that from an engineering and acoustic standpoint, sounds like utter sludge. It's not just the equipment you have - it's also whether you know how to use it. Imagination and talent can overcome the limitations in equipment, but all the equipment in the world couldn't make some of today's music sound good. It can make it sound sterile, perfect, planned out to the max and utterly crystal clear, but it can't give it soul, punch or swing. Record companies have forgotten this and overproduced and tested and marketed and formulized their music to death - which, I suspect accounts for more of the decline of CD sales than they think.
Listen to the Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street on vinyl on a halfway decent system on headphones. Take "Rocks Off". Pay close attention to the kick drum - it's right there, deep and loud and it doesn't get in the way of the bass. It may be ancient 16 track analog sound but the kick and bass have presence and seperation in a way that damn few of today's recordings pull off - often, what you'll hear is the bass bleeding all over the kick, making it sound like a wet sponge - and that's the sound your favored recording studios are recording and mixing because the people running the board don't have ears to hear it or the knowledge to do it right. And no, this has nothing to do with digital equipment or what kind of music it is - there are bands, such as U2 or the Stones themselves who can do with today's equipment. It's got everything to do with knowing what you're doing and hearing.
Buy from independent recording labels who don't have a history of persecuting file sharers.
Many of whose artists set themselves up in the same kind of studios you claim are worthless....
So I was just hanging around the hobbit cats, you know, digging the crazy pipe weed and the ale and wondering if I could ever get all the truth of it down, you know, the real deal, not the kind of half baked stuff you watch on the palentir but something that would make my heart whole, when this crazy cat named Biblo and his even crazier nephew Frodo started making a scene with some crazy birthday party where everyone was getting drunk and wailing to the moon and watching Gandalf, that old conjurer cat just get heavy with the fireworks jazz and I was yelling "Go, go, go" with the rest of them and then that Biblo cat gets up on the podium, lays down a nice little riff about how life's too short and sweet to hang out with great cats like us and then he just wigged, said "Goodbye" and POOF! that cat wasn't there. Everyone just flipped.
A little later, I got a gig as a gardener for Frodo and he used to lay on me all this crazy Elvish poetry about Elvish stuff, real high and mighty and soulful and sad, and one day that Gandalf came by and they were in the study talking away and because I started hearing something about the elves and just knew that Gandalf cat had some wonderful elvish poetry in him, I got too close to the window and started hearing all this wild, crazy talk about this ring Frodo had and this Sauron heavy who wanted to make the world into some kind of soulless meat factory and how he needed this ring to do all this and I guess I must have drank too much for lunch because I let out a little burp under the window and the next thing I know that cat Gandalf's pulling me into the house through the window threatening to turn me into something uncool like a toad and then he looks at me and says, "I know what a cat like you needs to do. You and Frodo need to go on the road."
And that's how the whole crazy thing started.
I went with planet CCRMA instead
on
Turn-Key Linux Audio
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Mostly because it was ready a couple of weeks ago when I was looking at Dave Phillips' page. This is where to find it. It runs on Red Hat 8 and everything seems to install well - I'm still casually working out some things here and there but Snd, Rosegarden and a few other things are working - haven't had a chance to try everything. One thing I've noticed is that other software packages I've downloaded elsewhere don't always get along with the libraries, probably because they were written with older distributions in mind.
One of the advantages is a special low latency kernel with ALSA built in. I've installed this and it's working.
I'll probably download the Turn-Key Linux Audio disc and see what I can get to work on my current installation - I downloaded and installed Red Hat 8 so I could check out Planet CCRMA, and don't really feel like switching to Mandrake.
Star Trek made many wonder whether there was intelligent life in the universe. Did Rescue 911 ever make you wonder if there was intelligent life on this planet? A lot of the people on that show were rescued when they did some awfully dumb and dangerous things...
What you are really calling for is the complete distruction of the pro music buisness.
Actually, I don't think it needs to go that far. The more "free music" competition there is and the more widespread it is, the more the professional music world will be forced to actually pay attention to what people want. This process is already well underway.
But also remember that musicians need to eat to, so even if it's indy music, please don't ask us to just give everything away for free.
There are those of us who are willing to give it away. As far as eating goes, some of us are willing to work day jobs and keep the music as a hobby, a much more realistic viewpoint then someone who hopes to be a mega big star.
Give it away. Seriously. Put mp3s wherever you can and let people have them at will. Fame? Fortune? You probably won't get it anyway and they can be disappointing when you do. Clear it all away and do it because you love it and give it to people because you want to share it; perhaps you'll parlay it into a little fame and fortune, more likely you won't.
It's time for the amateurs to take art and culture back from the professionals.
Yeah, but by doing this, are they risking their status as a common carrier?
Perhaps, if they HAD such status. Although many ISPs would prefer common carrier status, I've yet to hear of a definable ruling that they have it. It's an issue that neither the courts or Congress has directly addressed yet. I'm sure in the next few years, it will be settled, one way or another.
Disagree? Please point me to a court ruling that says I'm wrong.
... as evidence of that, I offer the Csound Book's list of recommended listening. Yes, Stockhausen and Subotnick are there, along with Nine Inch Nails, Aphex Twin, The Future Sound of London, Kraftwerk and DJ Shadow. The people involved in the electroacoustic scene, if that's what you want to call it, are not snobs and don't seperate themselves from electronica as a whole. Maybe you don't listen to it, but they do.
A company that doesn't have customers, or doesn't have enough customers to make it profitable, is dead. The corporate graveyards are full of companies that ignored this simple fact and went out of business. The shareholders or owners who insist upon being served before the company's customers often end up holding worthless pieces of paper, or selling at a loss.
Slashdot Mirror
... is this had been Joe Schmoe@anyISP.net he'd have probably had to fight a lot harder to keep his net.access than the University did. Whatever happened to the idea of innocent until proven guilty? They're not even listening to the files to make sure that they are actually ones they own.
Right now, I'm not sure the problem justifies a new infrastructure - but the day the government starts taxing e-mail, it'll be time to start a new one.
... and to fight, as the old saying goes. My observation, as a former alt.flamer, Meower and veteran of the alt.life.sucks/Skippy/HipCrime wars is that for every clueless newbie, there is a self-righteous experienced idiot who will burn a newsgroup down to the ground around him in flames rather than just use a killfile, sit on his hands and ignore the wretches. And before you blame troll sources such as Meow or "Aol'ers" or "Altopia posters" or "Web TV'ers", note that most of the flame wars I've read in various newsgroups are not newbies or trolls vs newsgroup regulars, it's interior faction X vs interior faction Y.
The mechanics of how these things work is interesting -
1. Poster A has been posting in alt.* for a good long time.
2. Poster B posts a flame, a troll, or just an unpopular opinion that Poster A objects to, in flaming language.
3. Escalation.
4. Poster A becomes a net.lawyer and net.cop and attempts to first, convince Poster B that he is "off-topic", abusive, or not part of the "community" and attempts to cut off B's net.access by complaint letters to B's ISP.
5. a)This often fails, in which case B finds out about it and the entire controversy continues to fester, with charges and countercharges of censorship and "law" breaking. b) It succeeds and B either learns a lesson - or gets a more secure account from netcopping and proceeds to start a personal vendetta against A.
The results are predictable - useful discussion decreases and noise increases.
Web boards, strangely enough, don't have this problem as much - seeing as it's one or a few people responsible for admitting people into the site, rules and enforcement tend to be more clear cut and not as controversial and varied - Slashdot, for example, isn't dependent on whether ISP X has a looser TOS than ISP Y. Furthermore, it's up to the administrators, not any Tom, Dick or Harry who wants to send a complaint E-mail to the offender's ISP. No one, even if they've been at a web board for X years is under the illusion that it's "their" webboard and they have the right to "enforce" their personal interpretation of rules.
In short, it's not just trolls and newbies that have impacted Usenet negatively - it's also the self-righteous and the intolerant.
... Snoop Doggy Dogg, Tupac and Dr. Dre as they were meant to be heard.
How the hell do all these people know I have a small penis?
... as in Barney Google ...
Whatever happened to grepping, anyway?
... is not just due to piracy, although it certainly has something to do with it. Just what kind of pop music tradition, not to mention alternative music tradition, did China have in the 1960's? The answer is, none at all. The government controlled all expression and pop music was considered Western and bourgeous. Anyone who wanted to listen to it HAD to pirate it on smuggled cassette tapes and they were taking a chance of getting caught. In short - it's not a case of an already established record industry being destroyed by record piracy - it's a case of a new record industry trying to make its way in a culture where record piracy was the only way to distribute music. Of course, they're going to have a great deal of trouble establishing themselves in that situation.
Saying that China's current state of the industry is our future state of the industry is comparing apples and oranges. We have thousands of bands who perform without any kind of corporate sponsorship at all, or even record contracts - it's a well established network of enterprise, one that extreme piracy would not eliminate. China has nothing like this and it's not going to be built up in a few short years. The music industry in China has a long, uphill battle - the music industry in America is facing a long, slow downhill slide. Quite a difference.
... Milli Vanilli were doing this years ago.
Clearly, if they started arresting the victims of crime, crime would instantly stop as all the victims would be in jail and safe from the criminals out roaming the streets. It's just another example of how the online world is showing society new and innovative ways to solve serious problems.
... competition from other forms of entertainment such as video games and DVDs.
e) The overall decline in importance of music in our culture - it's just not as central to popular culture now as it was in the 60s.
killed off by FM.
Actually, as a musical medium, AM *was* killed off by FM in the late 70s. How many AM stations are there left that play music?
And then all radio died, killed off by television.
Actually, that happened before. Stars like Jack Benny, Mirton Berle, and George Burns and shows like the Lone Ranger, soap operas, Sam and Margie, drama and variety evaporated from the AM dial in the early 50's as TV took over. Music then reigned until FM came along.
Movies and TV will be killed off by virtual reality adventures. Books will be killed off by general illiteracy. And we'll be killed off by cockroaches.
24-track digital multi-track recorder($3,500) ; 40-channel mixer/sound board($6,000) ; studio musicians ($???/hour) ; booth construction (ca. $10,000) ; sundries such as cables, media, beer, etc. ($1,000)
....
Wow, I wonder how the Beatles ever managed with their amateur 4 and 8 track equipment.
How good do you think that Pink Floyd album of yours would have sounded if it had been recorded in a garage using bicycle spokes and wooden spoons for the synthesized sound?
Um, just like Piper at the Gates of Dawn? See "The Scarecrow" for the wooden spoons and "Bike" for the bicycle sounds.
If you think for a moment that a person can't come up with a professional level recording using a home computer setup and a few inexpensive extras, then you just don't know what you're talking about. As a matter of fact, there is plenty of contemporary music produced in the kind of studios you describe that from an engineering and acoustic standpoint, sounds like utter sludge. It's not just the equipment you have - it's also whether you know how to use it. Imagination and talent can overcome the limitations in equipment, but all the equipment in the world couldn't make some of today's music sound good. It can make it sound sterile, perfect, planned out to the max and utterly crystal clear, but it can't give it soul, punch or swing. Record companies have forgotten this and overproduced and tested and marketed and formulized their music to death - which, I suspect accounts for more of the decline of CD sales than they think.
Listen to the Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street on vinyl on a halfway decent system on headphones. Take "Rocks Off". Pay close attention to the kick drum - it's right there, deep and loud and it doesn't get in the way of the bass. It may be ancient 16 track analog sound but the kick and bass have presence and seperation in a way that damn few of today's recordings pull off - often, what you'll hear is the bass bleeding all over the kick, making it sound like a wet sponge - and that's the sound your favored recording studios are recording and mixing because the people running the board don't have ears to hear it or the knowledge to do it right. And no, this has nothing to do with digital equipment or what kind of music it is - there are bands, such as U2 or the Stones themselves who can do with today's equipment. It's got everything to do with knowing what you're doing and hearing.
Buy from independent recording labels who don't have a history of persecuting file sharers.
Many of whose artists set themselves up in the same kind of studios you claim are worthless
I've said similar things before, but you've said it much better than I, or anyone else ever has.
Well, to begin with you no longer have the ability to choose your race. No more playing Dark Elves.
You can pick another race in the scenarios. If you get bored with the ones that come with the game you can go to aow2.heavengames.com and get more.
Secondly, and the biggest atrocity, the game is now level based. Its not the huge world that you can crush beneath your boot type game anymore.
Again, look at the scenarios - you're talking about the campaign game.
So I was just hanging around the hobbit cats, you know, digging the crazy pipe weed and the ale and wondering if I could ever get all the truth of it down, you know, the real deal, not the kind of half baked stuff you watch on the palentir but something that would make my heart whole, when this crazy cat named Biblo and his even crazier nephew Frodo started making a scene with some crazy birthday party where everyone was getting drunk and wailing to the moon and watching Gandalf, that old conjurer cat just get heavy with the fireworks jazz and I was yelling "Go, go, go" with the rest of them and then that Biblo cat gets up on the podium, lays down a nice little riff about how life's too short and sweet to hang out with great cats like us and then he just wigged, said "Goodbye" and POOF! that cat wasn't there. Everyone just flipped.
A little later, I got a gig as a gardener for Frodo and he used to lay on me all this crazy Elvish poetry about Elvish stuff, real high and mighty and soulful and sad, and one day that Gandalf came by and they were in the study talking away and because I started hearing something about the elves and just knew that Gandalf cat had some wonderful elvish poetry in him, I got too close to the window and started hearing all this wild, crazy talk about this ring Frodo had and this Sauron heavy who wanted to make the world into some kind of soulless meat factory and how he needed this ring to do all this and I guess I must have drank too much for lunch because I let out a little burp under the window and the next thing I know that cat Gandalf's pulling me into the house through the window threatening to turn me into something uncool like a toad and then he looks at me and says, "I know what a cat like you needs to do. You and Frodo need to go on the road."
And that's how the whole crazy thing started.
Mostly because it was ready a couple of weeks ago when I was looking at Dave Phillips' page. This is where to find it. It runs on Red Hat 8 and everything seems to install well - I'm still casually working out some things here and there but Snd, Rosegarden and a few other things are working - haven't had a chance to try everything. One thing I've noticed is that other software packages I've downloaded elsewhere don't always get along with the libraries, probably because they were written with older distributions in mind.
One of the advantages is a special low latency kernel with ALSA built in. I've installed this and it's working.
I'll probably download the Turn-Key Linux Audio disc and see what I can get to work on my current installation - I downloaded and installed Red Hat 8 so I could check out Planet CCRMA, and don't really feel like switching to Mandrake.
Star Trek made many wonder whether there was intelligent life in the universe. Did Rescue 911 ever make you wonder if there was intelligent life on this planet? A lot of the people on that show were rescued when they did some awfully dumb and dangerous things ...
Go fuck yourself.
What you are really calling for is the complete distruction of the pro music buisness.
Actually, I don't think it needs to go that far. The more "free music" competition there is and the more widespread it is, the more the professional music world will be forced to actually pay attention to what people want. This process is already well underway.
But also remember that musicians need to eat to, so even if it's indy music, please don't ask us to just give everything away for free.
There are those of us who are willing to give it away. As far as eating goes, some of us are willing to work day jobs and keep the music as a hobby, a much more realistic viewpoint then someone who hopes to be a mega big star.
Give it away. Seriously. Put mp3s wherever you can and let people have them at will. Fame? Fortune? You probably won't get it anyway and they can be disappointing when you do. Clear it all away and do it because you love it and give it to people because you want to share it; perhaps you'll parlay it into a little fame and fortune, more likely you won't.
It's time for the amateurs to take art and culture back from the professionals.
It's not quite what you had in mind but some of the old jukeboxes had a needle for each side of the record.
"If they can get broadband to the South Pole, why the hell can't we get it where we live?"
Yeah, but by doing this, are they risking their status as a common carrier?
Perhaps, if they HAD such status. Although many ISPs would prefer common carrier status, I've yet to hear of a definable ruling that they have it. It's an issue that neither the courts or Congress has directly addressed yet. I'm sure in the next few years, it will be settled, one way or another.
Disagree? Please point me to a court ruling that says I'm wrong.
... as evidence of that, I offer the Csound Book's list of recommended listening. Yes, Stockhausen and Subotnick are there, along with Nine Inch Nails, Aphex Twin, The Future Sound of London, Kraftwerk and DJ Shadow. The people involved in the electroacoustic scene, if that's what you want to call it, are not snobs and don't seperate themselves from electronica as a whole. Maybe you don't listen to it, but they do.
A company that doesn't have customers, or doesn't have enough customers to make it profitable, is dead. The corporate graveyards are full of companies that ignored this simple fact and went out of business. The shareholders or owners who insist upon being served before the company's customers often end up holding worthless pieces of paper, or selling at a loss.