Um, so he isn't EU council president? Since July? Please inform me and rid me of my ridiculous misunderstanding.
Or was that one of those "He doesn't have any real power because the EU president doesn't execute any real authority" comments? It's hard to tell.
In the past, totalitarian governments were usually based on some flavor of fascism or communism. We are now witnessing the birth of a new form of totalitarianism -- corporatocracy.
That's an important point about what we're on the brink of here, but dude. Fascism *is* corporatocracy. Just ask Mussolini(or if that doesn't cut it, a book or website about him). Or Berlusconi, the current media mogul prime minister, head of the EU, with strong ties to the neo-fascist party. One of the key goals of the fascist agenda(although one which was never fully realized) was the merging of government of economy into the Corporate State. As I recall, anyway.
but I'm bored, and kinda thirsty.
A vocoder, as it is (colloquially referred to) is a device which maps the formant content of one sound(carrier) onto the amplitude/fundamental of another(modulator). This is done in one of at least two ways:
Analog Style
The modulator signal is broken down into bands by sending it through a series of bandpass filters, and the output voltages of these filters drive a series of amplifiers, which are fed the same spectral bands of the carrier.
Digital Style
Essentially the same thing, but you manipulate the spectra with FFT instead.
The reason this tends to sound like the voice is being played by a keyboard, is that in the most common case(read Cher), the carrier is a keyboard, and the modular is the singer's voice. That way you play your melodic content on the synth, and apply the vocal formants with the vocoder, making the synth "talk".
Although as others have mentioned, vocoder is technically a general term, and doesn't necessarily mean what I just mentioned. I suggest using the more distinctive term: Assbox.
There's more truth to what you're saying than I think you realize. Perhaps the reason that people don't seem to care that explosions in space make loud boomy sounds, and that computer hackers navigate networks in ridiculous VR suits, is that they've already suspended their disbilief for what is often an extremely unreal story with fantastic premises.
Like a number of people, I watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, usually with large groups of friends. Most of them are in physics, and I don't think I've watched one show all the way through without somebody making a snide comment about the dubiousness of some bit of physics, chemistry or what have you.
Physics Nerd: "That shouldn't have made such a big explosion" Me: "You're watching a tv series about that assumes the existance of vampires, demons, magic, hell dimensions, the appearance and reappearance of souls, spirits, mystic births, oracles, and a teenage-college age rich girl who has been imbued with the sacred and confusing powers to conveniently save the universe during sweeps, who's died and come back 3 times for some reason. I think your claim to the position of 'evangelist of science and reason' is hereby null and void." *silence* Physics Nerd: "That shouldn't have made such a big explosion"
Not to insult those who find fault with movies that are actually trying to present a realistic world to us, but most of the time it seems you guys are just trying to prove your intellect. Or something.
I think what the original poster was getting at was more of an annoyance toward the systematic perjoration of germanic roots in the English language. It's quite true that people use these words differently, and that they have different semantic properties in day to day speech. However, it is clear that this arose from a socio-political divide, and not because the speakers of Old English were generally crude people.
It's toatally pervasive. In most cases all we do is attach slightly more significance to the french and latin roots and we're done. It irks me that people get so wet over french words that mean the same thing as those with germanic origins, but that's their game to play. I don't quite see why our 4-letter words have to be *so* taboo. I don't advocate language police, and I think I have a pretty fair grip on the nature of language dynamics as a collective emergence. Nonetheless, it pisses me off when people make a big deal about "fuck". It's a perfectly good word, can be used for some great effects, and doesn't carry much negative connotation other than the fact one said it.
Nobody's exactly trying to change the way English is when they express frustration at that sort of thing; that would require a whole lot more participation on the part of other people. But the processes of systematic perjoration in language change do tend to outline social rifts and prejudices. This makes some people uneasy. Women should be especially annoyed.
No, but it's a fairly sophisticated refinement of an old(ish) approach. The core ideas that make it possible have been around for a number of years, but there are a lot of constraints that make it difficult to achieve. And just for rant's sake, the qualifying use of the term 'phoneme' in the post is misleading. Phonemes are the fundamental of vocal articulation; it would be impossible to synthesize speech without them. What sets different TTS systems apart is how they are realized.
About 30 years ago, I built a voice synthesizer for my IMSAI-8080 based on the General Instruments SC-01 Phoneme Synthesizer chip, which was available at that time from Radio Shack.
Most of the early mass produced chips were analog formant synths. You'd get the best output with hand coded formants, but automatic ones were a little more complicated. Nonetheless, popular items such as the Speak and Spell were able to generate fairly intelligible speech with individual discretely coded phonemes. A lot of effort has been more recently given to 'diphone' and more generally 'concatenative' synthesis techniques.
In diphone models, speech is realized as the concatenation of(often recorded) transitions between segments. This helps with the fact that phonemes are contextually variable but gives rise to problems with smoothness and the flexibility of phonetic inventory. IBM's model is of the concatenative variety, but I don't know enough about what they're doing to say what their exact method is.
What is interesting, however, is that if you look carefully on their page you might notice that the voice is trained on natural data. That's something I haven't heard much about. After trying out the female voice a few times, I have to say that the intonation model is pretty solid compared to what else is out there. Not perfect, but certainly better than the drunken voice we've all come to know and love.
It turns out all speech is nothing but sequences of utterances ( vowels and syllabic ). Just string them together and you get speech. String them together very carefully and the speech begins sounding like it came from a human instead of a machine.
I'm not going to bite your head off for that comment, but I'm in linguistics and that's pretty insulting. On that plane of logic, computer code is nothing more than sequences of on and off(one and zero). Just string them together and you get programs. String them together carefully, and the program begins looking like it does something interesting, instead of causing the machine to freeze up. And I suppose Robotics is as simple as putting parts together and wiring them with motors. Wow, I could do that! Seriously though, truly natural speech is dependent on Semantics, Syntax, prosody, and whole host of intricately connected facets of language that people have devoted their lives to. Don't cheapen it for them.
Did you write that software yourself or with 3 to 4 other people max? Is that it? I don't mean to sound rude, but my impression is that software houses like what you're describing have a large number of employees working in various camps. By and large, everything is done by the artist(s) except for album cover art, mastering/mixing, and promotion. That's a whole lot of personal blood sweat and tears into your own creation to go down the drain.
Frankly, it's not just the royalty percentage that's so apalling. The $40k estimate is a best case scenario for all but a handful you can count in one sitting. The rest are broke or owe money in the end, while the label has profited(slightly). The artist is responsible for paying the costs of marketing and promotion a good deal of the time. If the album is a flop, the artist is fully responsible for it economically
They've got it set up as the best of both worlds for themselves, those music label assholes. Give the artist the "freedom" and "privialge" to be responsible for the economic success of their creation, and give them pennies on the dollar in any case. Very clever. The thing that sets you apart from them, my dear programmer, is that if the software that you helped write doesn't sell as well as the company would have liked, the blame isn't squarely placed on you. And, hopefully, you get to keep your salary, and a roof over your head.
In the current state of the recording industry, 99.9n percent of signed artists do not retain copyrights to the recordings they make. So, I guess this is a no brainer, huh? Metallica would obviously support this stuff, as we've seen before how they react to P2P but....
What about the rest of the thousands of RIAA signed acts? What do you think their opinion is about all this? Have you noticed a lack of voice from these people on the subject? Now why could that be? *Hint*: read the previous paragraph again. Bonus Question: How do you think independent artists that do have full control over their content would feel?
Anything someone can invent someone else can invent a way around
I agree. I'm not worried about CD protection schemes at this point, because every time a corporation implements DRM it's concerned with the prevention of digital copying. Why are they so obsessed with "perfect" digital copies anyway? Mp3 doesn't sound good enough to qualify that term. I'm quite satisfied with the sound quality of a well ripped Mp3, but the point is that all I need to crack the most severly protected CD is a computer and audio card with good A/D converters. Pretty much anything that's not oriented to the consumer market will do...M-Audio makes some stereo channel recording cards with really clear converters, offered somewhere in the 100-300$ price range.
I'm really surprised this doesn't come up more often. Soundblasters won't cut it, but honestly. All you need to make a good sounding mp3 are a sound source and a recording device with decent A/D quality. The only way they can stop us from doing that is to make it impossible to listen to the music in the first place.
I believe that students should be taught a standarized form of English in the classroom. It's simply the best way to ensure effective communication with a wide range of people(assuming they too have learned this standard). That said, I think that the methods and methodologies of American educators need serious rethinking.
I wonder if anyone reading Slashdot remembers the snafu over "Ebonics" from a number of years ago. Sometime in the 90's a school board in Oakland decided that it might be a good idea to recognize African American English(AAE)as a language spoken by a large percentage of its student body, and to educate teachers on how to effectively communicate with students. The Media(tm) had an uproar over it, and assailed them for trying to teach "Ebonics" as a foreign language. Much like Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders was trying to "teach children Masturbation", but I digress. I don't remember much about the incident as a teen, but I do remember the overbearing attitudes of my white peers and neighbors, which seemed to center around something like
"Why can't those damn black kids speak proper english like us?"
Linguistically speaking, AAE is a structurally and intellectually valid language, featuring complex syntax, pronunciation and grammar rules just like any other. I don't have the time or the resources to go into it, so I'll point you here. The truth of the matter is that the culturally and economically elite have been using standardized language to assert their hegemony over society for years, and the same true in America as it was in the initial triangle between Oxford, Cambridge and London. Students in America are teased, ridiculed and insulted for the use of valid dialects in ordinary speech. If you're a white American reader, chances are spectacular that you grew up speaking standard English in the home. Well, how convenient for you. The real point of an English class is not to get students speaking standard English natively or ordinarily, but simply to afford them the ability to use it when necessary (Higher education, job interviews, etc etc). The Oakland schoolboard's original idea was to make it easier for this to occur; teachers would be able to show comparisons between AAE and standard English, and help students learn what they need to change where and when.
Instead our educators(and much of the slashdot readership)assert their supposed superiority by scoffing at the "idiocy" and "childishness" of non standard language features. So while I'm not going to make any claims that l33t is a full featured language, perhaps teachers should try teaching children what it is, why it exists, and how it differs from standard English. Encourage kids to learn and use a standard dialect for specific skills, but don't simply punish them as though their deliberately trying to pollute the language. Sometimes I think gradeschool needs basic linguistics classes just so kids can learn why their English teachers are being such assholes to them.
While I'm sure tactics like this are advertised as anti-piracy measures, I'm excited about this as a sales technique. The online community(slashdot especially) has been talking for quite some time about the relative value of copyright when it comes to music recordings. A very common response has been one which suggests that in order to assure sales, a retailer/merchant/distributor/manufacturer needs to give a prospective buyer a good reason to purchase.
The traditional extension to that idea I've come across here is that in most transactions the consumer is paying for a service rendered. For example, a new car was built by a factory and an ordinary consumer cannot make his own. Same goes for computer parts, TVs, and many types of clothes. The consumer has discovered, through the advent of consumer digital media devices(esp computers), that the act of taking an existing digital audio recording and duplicating it is trivial and practically mundane. The artist(who only has to record the album once) does a lot more work than the record company copying it, particularly within the boundries of the insane amount of elbow grease that goes into writing/recording/touring.
You may think Bon Jovi is the lamest crap on earth, but in my opinion this strategy not only sounds like an effective solution but a vote of confidence for consumers. For once a recording institution is admitting that it needs to work to keep it's customers loyal instead of the other way around.
Audiogalaxy Satellite(save for the eventual spyware)was one the most amazing things ever to happen on the internet. On the original service I was able to find new artists and sample their music in full before making a purchase decision. This included very indenpendant artists that I would have never heard on the radio and certainly aren't available on Rhapsody. I was able to find all the tracks from the soundtrack to the movie Real Genius, which is one of my favourites. The soundtrack wasn't ever even released for purchase! All in all I bought a large handfull of discs that I never would have before thanks to their service. Hell, some of the artists I would have never discovered had it not been for the "If you like this artist, try this one" feature. On Satellite, it seemed, no album/musician/track was too obscure to be found.
On the other hand, Rhapsody costs $10 a month. You can't download anything. It uses WMA for encoding. Music is only added as the central company adds it, which makes it very difficult for non mainstream music to compete. You can't share anything. None of this music(which you are paying for)can be downloaded to a portable mp3 player. Last I checked, Radiohead wasn't available as a listening option. I looked around in the David Bowie category and sauntered up to the Low album, which is a favorite of mine. It was missing half the tracks.
This is f*cking rediculous. I would have been quite happy if they could just revive Satellite with a subscription system, paying the artists as they go for downloads. It doesn't seem so farfetched to me anyway. Once again this situation gives the RIAA way too much power and leverage. And the modern brilliance of taking your independant record, releasing it on P2P, and watching your music propagate throughout the networks and into people's view is dead.
For $10 a month, go to a local record store that lets you listen to CDs, and check shit out for free. Then look for a used copy, and give the RIAA the hot and bothered middle finger.
Simple logic indeed. You need to be very careful when you draw mass conclusions like this. So you think that most crime is committed poorer neighborhood...where did you get that information? Cops, America's Dumbest Criminals, crime movies and newspaper articles written by biased middle class white America. Have you ever lived in a ghetto or known someone in a similar area? Are you positing that people in poorer areas commit more crime because it's "common knowledge"?
I've got news for you Jack, there's a big difference between "crime" and "visible crime". Most "white collar" crime goes undetected because no one is looking for it. Have you ever smoked pot or been dealt an ilicit substance? What about underage drinking? Anyone around you or people you know? I'd be willing to bet that the police don't have their eye on you, or your neighborhood/friends/peers, because *you* don't live in a high crime neighborhood. How bloody convenient. You'd think that a good place to look for drug dealers would be colleges and universities, right? There's a huge amount of drug use among undergrads. They have to get their drugs from somwhere, obviously. But if your school isn't USC(smack in the middle of urban Los Angeles), chances are the police aren't staking out your neighborhood, because it isn't a high crime neighborhood. How also very convenient.
Off the subject of drugs, lets look at fraud and corruption. Traditional upperclass crime here. And for the most part, unless a scandal emerges or much noise is made in the process, these crimes are practically undetectable. It's not like we have cops randomly patrolling businesses and harassing people in suits. It's a lot easier to hide that you've been embezzling tiny amounts of money from employees 401k for 20 years when no one is watching you closely. Especially when you're not in a "high crime area", where it's obvious that most crimes are committed. Lets look at the most notorious serial killers, bank robbers, kidnappers, massacres, frauds, extortionists and terrorists. People who committed crimes so heinous that no one could possibly ignore them. It spans the racial map rather evenly. Kinda puts a damper on your whole "most crime is committed by minorities in poor neighborhoods" bullshit, doesn't it?
I have a great fear that we're progressing into a world where English is the norm, and that bothers me quite a bit. Sign language is by all accounts a valid and full featured language, just not a spoken one. I don't believe that people should be required or even expected to communicate in a non native language if they don't want to...and especially if they can't. For chrissake, would it kill people to learn a little bit of A/ISL? And similarly would it be that much of a problem for people in countries like the US to catch up with the much of the west and expect fluency in multiple tongues? This thing comes across as a sort of disability device and that sickens me. Sign Language is not a disability. Nor Spanish, nor Hebrew, Pashto or anything else. And despite claims by the right, English is not the official language here in America. Whew. Breathe.
The whole point of the Theremin is that you only need to use your bare hands, since the tone is a function of the distance between you and the pitch rod. I think a Powerglove would just complicate things. However, this could be a real boon for MIDI artists on a serious budget(PD/Jmax). There is a rich history of glove interfaces to other Midi instruments. The MAX programming environment has a 'glove' object that interfaces with the new defunct Gold Brick interface. Plus, for the ultimate in coolness, there's Laetitia Sonami's Lady's Glove , which rocks my world. Check out the video .
Why not just wait for Gobe Productive?
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 2
I have the utmost respect for Sun, but if you're going to spend ~80$ then you may be better off waiting for Gobe Productive to come out. Which is here. I have been following these guys since the Beos days, and v 3.0 looks like hot shit. And Ars Technica seems to think so too. The Linux version is coming out soon, and if you buy the Windows version at its introductory price(~80$) they will send you the Linux version for free when it comes out.
For Chrissake, this is getting rediculous. Speech works just fine for interfacing with ordinary human beings after all. I mean, I know that we're all used to internet chat, email, message boards, etc, but unless you are a complete loser you've got at least a few friends and co-workers that you speak to on a regular basis. Natural language(speech, hand signals or what have you) is efficient, powerful and universal in human beings. Here's why it hasn't happened *yet*:
1)Computers don't speak any language, at least not like people do. Binary code is *not* a language, as we know it. It is logic, a series of instructions. 2)Computers will need to become a whole lot more powerful before they can develop the necessary features to be able to overcome (1).You and I speak a semantic language, one that is dependent on meaning. It doesn't help to simply make arbitrary relations of one thing to another in a computer's memory because ultimately the computer has no concept of *what* the things are let alone why they should be related. This is extreeeeeeeemely important.
Human Language Technology is the future, and it is going to be very difficult to escape it. And no, not all human-->computer action will be spoken, just like it is often more efficient for you to sit down an a typewriter and type rather than to dictate to someone else. Lets take Star Trek(tm) as an example. As far as I'm aware, the trekity folks still interfaced with the computer in traditional ways...punching buttons/menus/etc. But for abstract requests, it was so cool to hear them say: "Computer...give me all the statistical aberrancies for blah in the blah blah."
Just think, in the 50's barely anyone could picture ordinary folks interfacing with computers at all.
Seems like at least one musician thinks his A paper is being peddled all over town.
Poor guy. But there are two ways to prevent that kind of thing from happening to you:
1)Always enter into a favorable up-front royalty aggreement with any record company in contracts. Always. Even if you think the contracted work will come to nothing.
2)Join ASCAP It is a lot easier for a record company to brush off the royalty statement requests of a burnt out hippie than a powerful organziation representing him. Generally speaking.
I appreciate what this guy is doing, but seriously folks, why the hell is everybody
so intent on making some sort of BE/Linux hybrid? I support OpenBeos for the following very good reasons:
1) Has over 100 developers now
2) Intent on rewriting original Be api so that compile and eventual binary compatibility is attained
3) Uses an alternate liscense to GPL so that open source is maintained without frightening away commercial developers due to fear of *GPL Contamination*
4) Already has contacts with commercial developers and distributors (albeit kept well under wrap right now)
5) Misc. Beos fans don't want to touch Gnome/KDE with a ten foot pole, and I know it would be way too tempting to port them for application compatibility purposes. Beos booted on my PII400 in 15 seconds, and was fast as hell. Would a BE/Linux combo keep Beos' vastly ease of use and configuration, or would it inherit Linux's most dreaded characteristics?
I'm rambling like a rabbit with the flu. But these are some valid concerns. Check out OpenBeos right now and sign up if you have the time and skills.
So can you open 42 versions of the same.avi movie on your Linux Desktop and play them simultaneously without dropped frames while surfing the internet on a PII450? If not then regardless of the impressive numbers your assessment of comparability of Linux needs adjusting. Not to diss Linux or anything, but I don't think it is time to proclaim Linux has eclipsed Be's technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, so he isn't EU council president? Since July? Please inform me and rid me of my ridiculous misunderstanding. Or was that one of those "He doesn't have any real power because the EU president doesn't execute any real authority" comments? It's hard to tell.
In the past, totalitarian governments were usually based on some flavor of fascism or communism. We are now witnessing the birth of a new form of totalitarianism -- corporatocracy.
That's an important point about what we're on the brink of here, but dude. Fascism *is* corporatocracy. Just ask Mussolini(or if that doesn't cut it, a book or website about him). Or Berlusconi, the current media mogul prime minister, head of the EU, with strong ties to the neo-fascist party. One of the key goals of the fascist agenda(although one which was never fully realized) was the merging of government of economy into the Corporate State. As I recall, anyway.
Should I take it, then that you hate pianos?
The modulator signal is broken down into bands by sending it through a series of bandpass filters, and the output voltages of these filters drive a series of amplifiers, which are fed the same spectral bands of the carrier.
Essentially the same thing, but you manipulate the spectra with FFT instead.
The reason this tends to sound like the voice is being played by a keyboard, is that in the most common case(read Cher), the carrier is a keyboard, and the modular is the singer's voice. That way you play your melodic content on the synth, and apply the vocal formants with the vocoder, making the synth "talk". Although as others have mentioned, vocoder is technically a general term, and doesn't necessarily mean what I just mentioned. I suggest using the more distinctive term: Assbox.That's an interesting point. :)
There's more truth to what you're saying than I think you realize. Perhaps the reason that people don't seem to care that explosions in space make loud boomy sounds, and that computer hackers navigate networks in ridiculous VR suits, is that they've already suspended their disbilief for what is often an extremely unreal story with fantastic premises.
Like a number of people, I watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, usually with large groups of friends. Most of them are in physics, and I don't think I've watched one show all the way through without somebody making a snide comment about the dubiousness of some bit of physics, chemistry or what have you.
Physics Nerd: "That shouldn't have made such a big explosion"Me: "You're watching a tv series about that assumes the existance of vampires, demons, magic, hell dimensions, the appearance and reappearance of souls, spirits, mystic births, oracles, and a teenage-college age rich girl who has been imbued with the sacred and confusing powers to conveniently save the universe during sweeps, who's died and come back 3 times for some reason. I think your claim to the position of 'evangelist of science and reason' is hereby null and void."
*silence*
Physics Nerd: "That shouldn't have made such a big explosion"
Not to insult those who find fault with movies that are actually trying to present a realistic world to us, but most of the time it seems you guys are just trying to prove your intellect. Or something.
I think what the original poster was getting at was more of an annoyance toward the systematic perjoration of germanic roots in the English language. It's quite true that people use these words differently, and that they have different semantic properties in day to day speech. However, it is clear that this arose from a socio-political divide, and not because the speakers of Old English were generally crude people.
It's toatally pervasive. In most cases all we do is attach slightly more significance to the french and latin roots and we're done. It irks me that people get so wet over french words that mean the same thing as those with germanic origins, but that's their game to play. I don't quite see why our 4-letter words have to be *so* taboo. I don't advocate language police, and I think I have a pretty fair grip on the nature of language dynamics as a collective emergence. Nonetheless, it pisses me off when people make a big deal about "fuck". It's a perfectly good word, can be used for some great effects, and doesn't carry much negative connotation other than the fact one said it.
Nobody's exactly trying to change the way English is when they express frustration at that sort of thing; that would require a whole lot more participation on the part of other people. But the processes of systematic perjoration in language change do tend to outline social rifts and prejudices. This makes some people uneasy. Women should be especially annoyed.
Governor - Governess
Master - Mistress
Courtier - Courtesan
Bachelor - Spinster
Husband - Hussy
Think about it, yo.
Apology accepted. :) Sometimes I'm a little too quick to defend my area of study against real or imagined attacks against its legitimacy.
And I think you're right. Placement is everything. Cheers.
This is not a new approach.
No, but it's a fairly sophisticated refinement of an old(ish) approach. The core ideas that make it possible have been around for a number of years, but there are a lot of constraints that make it difficult to achieve. And just for rant's sake, the qualifying use of the term 'phoneme' in the post is misleading. Phonemes are the fundamental of vocal articulation; it would be impossible to synthesize speech without them. What sets different TTS systems apart is how they are realized.
About 30 years ago, I built a voice synthesizer for my IMSAI-8080 based on the General Instruments SC-01 Phoneme Synthesizer chip, which was available at that time from Radio Shack.
Most of the early mass produced chips were analog formant synths. You'd get the best output with hand coded formants, but automatic ones were a little more complicated. Nonetheless, popular items such as the Speak and Spell were able to generate fairly intelligible speech with individual discretely coded phonemes. A lot of effort has been more recently given to 'diphone' and more generally 'concatenative' synthesis techniques.
In diphone models, speech is realized as the concatenation of(often recorded) transitions between segments. This helps with the fact that phonemes are contextually variable but gives rise to problems with smoothness and the flexibility of phonetic inventory. IBM's model is of the concatenative variety, but I don't know enough about what they're doing to say what their exact method is.
What is interesting, however, is that if you look carefully on their page you might notice that the voice is trained on natural data. That's something I haven't heard much about. After trying out the female voice a few times, I have to say that the intonation model is pretty solid compared to what else is out there. Not perfect, but certainly better than the drunken voice we've all come to know and love.
It turns out all speech is nothing but sequences of utterances ( vowels and syllabic ). Just string them together and you get speech. String them together very carefully and the speech begins sounding like it came from a human instead of a machine.
I'm not going to bite your head off for that comment, but I'm in linguistics and that's pretty insulting. On that plane of logic, computer code is nothing more than sequences of on and off(one and zero). Just string them together and you get programs. String them together carefully, and the program begins looking like it does something interesting, instead of causing the machine to freeze up. And I suppose Robotics is as simple as putting parts together and wiring them with motors. Wow, I could do that! Seriously though, truly natural speech is dependent on Semantics, Syntax, prosody, and whole host of intricately connected facets of language that people have devoted their lives to. Don't cheapen it for them.
Later.
Did you write that software yourself or with 3 to 4 other people max? Is that it? I don't mean to sound rude, but my impression is that software houses like what you're describing have a large number of employees working in various camps. By and large, everything is done by the artist(s) except for album cover art, mastering/mixing, and promotion. That's a whole lot of personal blood sweat and tears into your own creation to go down the drain.
Frankly, it's not just the royalty percentage that's so apalling. The $40k estimate is a best case scenario for all but a handful you can count in one sitting. The rest are broke or owe money in the end, while the label has profited(slightly). The artist is responsible for paying the costs of marketing and promotion a good deal of the time. If the album is a flop, the artist is fully responsible for it economically
They've got it set up as the best of both worlds for themselves, those music label assholes. Give the artist the "freedom" and "privialge" to be responsible for the economic success of their creation, and give them pennies on the dollar in any case. Very clever. The thing that sets you apart from them, my dear programmer, is that if the software that you helped write doesn't sell as well as the company would have liked, the blame isn't squarely placed on you. And, hopefully, you get to keep your salary, and a roof over your head.In the current state of the recording industry, 99.9n percent of signed artists do not retain copyrights to the recordings they make. So, I guess this is a no brainer, huh? Metallica would obviously support this stuff, as we've seen before how they react to P2P but....
What about the rest of the thousands of RIAA signed acts? What do you think their opinion is about all this? Have you noticed a lack of voice from these people on the subject? Now why could that be? *Hint*: read the previous paragraph again. Bonus Question: How do you think independent artists that do have full control over their content would feel?
I agree. I'm not worried about CD protection schemes at this point, because every time a corporation implements DRM it's concerned with the prevention of digital copying. Why are they so obsessed with "perfect" digital copies anyway? Mp3 doesn't sound good enough to qualify that term. I'm quite satisfied with the sound quality of a well ripped Mp3, but the point is that all I need to crack the most severly protected CD is a computer and audio card with good A/D converters. Pretty much anything that's not oriented to the consumer market will do...M-Audio makes some stereo channel recording cards with really clear converters, offered somewhere in the 100-300$ price range.
I'm really surprised this doesn't come up more often. Soundblasters won't cut it, but honestly. All you need to make a good sounding mp3 are a sound source and a recording device with decent A/D quality. The only way they can stop us from doing that is to make it impossible to listen to the music in the first place.
For a lark, I did the calculations for artificially imposing a magnetic field if the Earth ever lost its own.
You can talk to birds ?!
:D
Wow. I need to start keeping up with science.
So why not use water...
Because its stupid.
I believe that students should be taught a standarized form of English in the classroom. It's simply the best way to ensure effective communication with a wide range of people(assuming they too have learned this standard). That said, I think that the methods and methodologies of American educators need serious rethinking.
I wonder if anyone reading Slashdot remembers the snafu over "Ebonics" from a number of years ago. Sometime in the 90's a school board in Oakland decided that it might be a good idea to recognize African American English(AAE)as a language spoken by a large percentage of its student body, and to educate teachers on how to effectively communicate with students. The Media(tm) had an uproar over it, and assailed them for trying to teach "Ebonics" as a foreign language. Much like Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders was trying to "teach children Masturbation", but I digress. I don't remember much about the incident as a teen, but I do remember the overbearing attitudes of my white peers and neighbors, which seemed to center around something like
"Why can't those damn black kids speak proper english like us?"
Linguistically speaking, AAE is a structurally and intellectually valid language, featuring complex syntax, pronunciation and grammar rules just like any other. I don't have the time or the resources to go into it, so I'll point you here. The truth of the matter is that the culturally and economically elite have been using standardized language to assert their hegemony over society for years, and the same true in America as it was in the initial triangle between Oxford, Cambridge and London. Students in America are teased, ridiculed and insulted for the use of valid dialects in ordinary speech. If you're a white American reader, chances are spectacular that you grew up speaking standard English in the home. Well, how convenient for you. The real point of an English class is not to get students speaking standard English natively or ordinarily, but simply to afford them the ability to use it when necessary (Higher education, job interviews, etc etc). The Oakland schoolboard's original idea was to make it easier for this to occur; teachers would be able to show comparisons between AAE and standard English, and help students learn what they need to change where and when.
Instead our educators(and much of the slashdot readership)assert their supposed superiority by scoffing at the "idiocy" and "childishness" of non standard language features. So while I'm not going to make any claims that l33t is a full featured language, perhaps teachers should try teaching children what it is, why it exists, and how it differs from standard English. Encourage kids to learn and use a standard dialect for specific skills, but don't simply punish them as though their deliberately trying to pollute the language. Sometimes I think gradeschool needs basic linguistics classes just so kids can learn why their English teachers are being such assholes to them.
While I'm sure tactics like this are advertised as anti-piracy measures, I'm excited about this as a sales technique. The online community(slashdot especially) has been talking for quite some time about the relative value of copyright when it comes to music recordings. A very common response has been one which suggests that in order to assure sales, a retailer/merchant/distributor/manufacturer needs to give a prospective buyer a good reason to purchase.
The traditional extension to that idea I've come across here is that in most transactions the consumer is paying for a service rendered. For example, a new car was built by a factory and an ordinary consumer cannot make his own. Same goes for computer parts, TVs, and many types of clothes. The consumer has discovered, through the advent of consumer digital media devices(esp computers), that the act of taking an existing digital audio recording and duplicating it is trivial and practically mundane. The artist(who only has to record the album once) does a lot more work than the record company copying it, particularly within the boundries of the insane amount of elbow grease that goes into writing/recording/touring.
You may think Bon Jovi is the lamest crap on earth, but in my opinion this strategy not only sounds like an effective solution but a vote of confidence for consumers. For once a recording institution is admitting that it needs to work to keep it's customers loyal instead of the other way around.
Warning, I'm really pissed off.
Audiogalaxy Satellite(save for the eventual spyware)was one the most amazing things ever to happen on the internet. On the original service I was able to find new artists and sample their music in full before making a purchase decision. This included very indenpendant artists that I would have never heard on the radio and certainly aren't available on Rhapsody.
I was able to find all the tracks from the soundtrack to the movie Real Genius, which is one of my favourites. The soundtrack wasn't ever even released for purchase!
All in all I bought a large handfull of discs that I never would have before thanks to their service. Hell, some of the artists I would have never discovered had it not been for the "If you like this artist, try this one" feature. On Satellite, it seemed, no album/musician/track was too obscure to be found.
On the other hand, Rhapsody costs $10 a month. You can't download anything. It uses WMA for encoding. Music is only added as the central company adds it, which makes it very difficult for non mainstream music to compete. You can't share anything. None of this music(which you are paying for)can be downloaded to a portable mp3 player. Last I checked, Radiohead wasn't available as a listening option. I looked around in the David Bowie category and sauntered up to the Low album, which is a favorite of mine. It was missing half the tracks.
This is f*cking rediculous. I would have been quite happy if they could just revive Satellite with a subscription system, paying the artists as they go for downloads. It doesn't seem so farfetched to me anyway. Once again this situation gives the RIAA way too much power and leverage. And the modern brilliance of taking your independant record, releasing it on P2P, and watching your music propagate throughout the networks and into people's view is dead.
For $10 a month, go to a local record store that lets you listen to CDs, and check shit out for free. Then look for a used copy, and give the RIAA the hot and bothered middle finger.
Simple Logic
Simple logic indeed. You need to be very careful when you draw mass conclusions like this. So you think that most crime is committed poorer neighborhood...where did you get that information? Cops, America's Dumbest Criminals, crime movies and newspaper articles written by biased middle class white America. Have you ever lived in a ghetto or known someone in a similar area? Are you positing that people in poorer areas commit more crime because it's "common knowledge"?
I've got news for you Jack, there's a big difference between "crime" and "visible crime". Most "white collar" crime goes undetected because no one is looking for it. Have you ever smoked pot or been dealt an ilicit substance? What about underage drinking? Anyone around you or people you know? I'd be willing to bet that the police don't have their eye on you, or your neighborhood/friends/peers, because *you* don't live in a high crime neighborhood. How bloody convenient. You'd think that a good place to look for drug dealers would be colleges and universities, right? There's a huge amount of drug use among undergrads. They have to get their drugs from somwhere, obviously. But if your school isn't USC(smack in the middle of urban Los Angeles), chances are the police aren't staking out your neighborhood, because it isn't a high crime neighborhood. How also very convenient.
Off the subject of drugs, lets look at fraud and corruption. Traditional upperclass crime here. And for the most part, unless a scandal emerges or much noise is made in the process, these crimes are practically undetectable. It's not like we have cops randomly patrolling businesses and harassing people in suits. It's a lot easier to hide that you've been embezzling tiny amounts of money from employees 401k for 20 years when no one is watching you closely. Especially when you're not in a "high crime area", where it's obvious that most crimes are committed. Lets look at the most notorious serial killers, bank robbers, kidnappers, massacres, frauds, extortionists and terrorists. People who committed crimes so heinous that no one could possibly ignore them. It spans the racial map rather evenly. Kinda puts a damper on your whole "most crime is committed by minorities in poor neighborhoods" bullshit, doesn't it?
I have a great fear that we're progressing into a world where English is the norm, and that bothers me quite a bit. Sign language is by all accounts a valid and full featured language, just not a spoken one. I don't believe that people should be required or even expected to communicate in a non native language if they don't want to...and especially if they can't. For chrissake, would it kill people to learn a little bit of A/ISL? And similarly would it be that much of a problem for people in countries like the US to catch up with the much of the west and expect fluency in multiple tongues? This thing comes across as a sort of disability device and that sickens me. Sign Language is not a disability. Nor Spanish, nor Hebrew, Pashto or anything else. And despite claims by the right, English is not the official language here in America. Whew. Breathe.
The whole point of the Theremin is that you only need to use your bare hands, since the tone is a function of the distance between you and the pitch rod. I think a Powerglove would just complicate things. However, this could be a real boon for MIDI artists on a serious budget(PD/Jmax). There is a rich history of glove interfaces to other Midi instruments. The MAX programming environment has a 'glove' object that interfaces with the new defunct Gold Brick interface. Plus, for the ultimate in coolness, there's Laetitia Sonami's Lady's Glove , which rocks my world. Check out the video .
I have the utmost respect for Sun, but if you're going to spend ~80$ then you may be better off waiting for Gobe Productive to come out. Which is here. I have been following these guys since the Beos days, and v 3.0 looks like hot shit. And Ars Technica seems to think so too. The Linux version is coming out soon, and if you buy the Windows version at its introductory price(~80$) they will send you the Linux version for free when it comes out.
For Chrissake, this is getting rediculous. Speech works just fine for interfacing with ordinary human beings after all. I mean, I know that we're all used to internet chat, email, message boards, etc, but unless you are a complete loser you've got at least a few friends and co-workers that you speak to on a regular basis. Natural language(speech, hand signals or what have you) is efficient, powerful and universal in human beings. Here's why it hasn't happened *yet*:
1)Computers don't speak any language, at least not like people do. Binary code is *not* a language, as we know it. It is logic, a series of instructions.
2)Computers will need to become a whole lot more powerful before they can develop the necessary features to be able to overcome (1).You and I speak a semantic language, one that is dependent on meaning. It doesn't help to simply make arbitrary relations of one thing to another in a computer's memory because ultimately the computer has no concept of *what* the things are let alone why they should be related. This is extreeeeeeeemely important.
Human Language Technology is the future, and it is going to be very difficult to escape it. And no, not all human-->computer action will be spoken, just like it is often more efficient for you to sit down an a typewriter and type rather than to dictate to someone else. Lets take Star Trek(tm) as an example. As far as I'm aware, the trekity folks still interfaced with the computer in traditional ways...punching buttons/menus/etc. But for abstract requests, it was so cool to hear them say: "Computer...give me all the statistical aberrancies for blah in the blah blah."
Just think, in the 50's barely anyone could picture ordinary folks interfacing with computers at all.
Seems like at least one musician thinks his A paper is being peddled all over town.
Poor guy. But there are two ways to prevent that kind of thing from happening to you:
1)Always enter into a favorable up-front royalty aggreement with any record company in contracts. Always. Even if you think the contracted work will come to nothing.
2)Join ASCAP It is a lot easier for a record company to brush off the royalty statement requests of a burnt out hippie than a powerful organziation representing him. Generally speaking.
I appreciate what this guy is doing, but seriously folks, why the hell is everybody so intent on making some sort of BE/Linux hybrid? I support OpenBeos for the following very good reasons:
1) Has over 100 developers now
2) Intent on rewriting original Be api so that compile and eventual binary compatibility is attained
3) Uses an alternate liscense to GPL so that open source is maintained without frightening away commercial developers due to fear of *GPL Contamination*
4) Already has contacts with commercial developers and distributors (albeit kept well under wrap right now)
5) Misc. Beos fans don't want to touch Gnome/KDE with a ten foot pole, and I know it would be way too tempting to port them for application compatibility purposes. Beos booted on my PII400 in 15 seconds, and was fast as hell. Would a BE/Linux combo keep Beos' vastly ease of use and configuration, or would it inherit Linux's most dreaded characteristics?
I'm rambling like a rabbit with the flu. But these are some valid concerns. Check out OpenBeos right now and sign up if you have the time and skills.
So can you open 42 versions of the same