Apparently the Nigerian govt. would rather have Windows on the machine from what I heard on the news.
Good for the American economy and bad for them. Plus, it's not like you really expect Nigerian open source programmers contributing. Look at China. You see any open source programmers from China?
Oh, and the fact that it is $188, not $100 disturbed the reporter too. The fact that the Intel machine was much more expensive didn't put him off but then that runs a "real" OS doesn't it...
Who cares? OLPC was about an idea and motivating design concepts in laptops. That worked magically. Yeah, we had all the talk about helping children in 3rd world countries but it was more about spurring new ideas and design techniques in the US skill base. Where were all the designs done for the system?
Those OLPC laptop innovations will probably creep into the laptop you buy 4 years down the road.
That said, it's easy to get a teaching job even if you're a complete idiot, as long as you're a mildly charismatic idiot (which most are). It's also quite difficult for HR to tell a genius from a quack, because people persons and computer persons speak two very different languages.
Stop with the n00b posts.
Your genius index is the sum of the inverse of the acceptance ratio of the conference your paper was accepted to plus the sum of the status of the research journal (e.g. transactions) you published an article on plus a certain function of where your last university affiliation was ( e.g. Phd or post-doc ).
Many people who know what they're doing would make TERRIBLE teachers... which happens quite frequently in college. They are hired for their status and intellect for the college... but they don't know the first thing about teaching that knowledge.
That is for n00b stuff.
Teaching in the modern world has come down to pay.edu organization X to get some guy to blah blah in front of you for 50 minutes 3 times a week.
They are not hired for their status - they are hired because they will teach their graduate students who will in turn become good researchers and so on. Undergraduate classes are just a cash cow for universities. Nobody cares about the UG stuff - esp. not the students. Give them an A and they will think the teacher teaches wonderfully.
Even at 'only' $250, it's that or a Wii. And the Wii is a stable platform, whereas your cutting edge premium card is going to look overpriced and behind the curve tomorrow - ask all the people who just ordered $400 8800 GTS cards how that feels.
Come on, own up: who's buying these console-priced cards, and why?
I spend $715 on rent every month. I guess I can live for $300 in a crummy studio. Why spend extra?
For example, Presonus Firebox and Firepod. Not just support but proper latency support I guess ( if I can so bold to demand them )
The USB keyboards ( like M-Audio keystations and others ).
It would be really sweet to work on audio in Linux for us CS geeks ( write scripts for audio effects rather than knobs and bars in weird custom interfaces ).
You can get a decent room put together for under 5-10k.
OK. I'm guessing that you're already assuming that the band owns a house or the property for the room. Otherwise, it's 5-10K just for the rent per year.
You're also assuming that the person building the room will have full knowledge of room acoustics and sound proofing material and such.
Plus, what does decent room mean? There is no way to quantify what a decent room is. There could be a problem that without professional advice could not be found. The end product is the music which is multi-track, goes through mics, preamps, analog to digital converters, and then through back out a speaker system in maybe a different acoustic environment recording instruments with all different peculiarities. How are you possibly going to figure out the problem or track it down without extensive knowledge?
Basically you have low barrier of entry, and relatively low cost of production. The main hurdle is marketing your stuff, and as another poster insightfully pointed out, there's going to be a growing segment of marketers for just these types of bands. Those with talent may soon find their ship has finally come in. In the end this may finally start to redistribute the wealth more evenly then the extremes between the traditional starving artists and Britney class megastars. Well unless the government somehow manages to fuck all this up which is quite possible.
Why would there be a growing segment of marketers for these kinds of bands?
The local band scene thing is dead. Bars have crappy PAs destroyed years ago by all the smoke and they charge high cover charges.
It's risky to buy a CD from a local band since it have some production flaw. One CD I bought had something wrong with it - it always sound tinny and made me want to vomit but comparing side by side with other albums it was fine but listing it the whole way through, there was something wrong with it. Most of the times you can just tell that it's shitty instruments or shitty mics or shitty rooms or all of the above. Recoding good music is a black art and not an exact science right now.
Seriously, what expensive startup costs? If you want to record yourself there's the initial outlay in a powerful computer set up and perhaps Pro Tools, and some good microphones for drums and vocals. So--maybe $10,000? $20,000? And once you've got that equipment, you can use it as much as you want, with no hourly studio time.
You need a very good room first - a room where the sound doesn't bounce around in any frequency range.
You don't make a warehouse into a concert hall and start booking orchestras and selling tickets. The acoustics must be taken into consideration. Otherwise, it will sound like you're recording under water, or recording in a tin can or recording inside a sewer depending on the room structure.
Yes, 10,000 can get decent equipment. $2000-$3000 for 2 good mics, $1000 for drum mics, $2000-$3000 for good preamps, $2000 for a good EQ. Plus, cables, stands etc etc. But, after you get all of that, it's not going to record by itself. There is a lot of knowledge that is required to make a good recording. Just buying a copy of Visual C++ doesn't mean that a major software can just be reproduced.
And if you don't have the knowhow or money to do the recording yourself, there are all kinds of small studios with perfectly decent engineers that charge less than $1,000 for a day. It's perfectly feasible to record an album for $5,000-$10,000 this way, or much less if you have connections or friends in the small-time recording industry.
I have found out that most are shitty engineers and it's very hard to find good engineers. YOu need big money to hire good engineers or good luck to hire good engineers before they are famous.
After that, electronic distribution is essentially free, via MySpace, or by setting yourself up on iTunes, eMusic, etc. If you also need CDs, a company like Kunaki can produce them for you on the fly for less than $2 each, *and* handle the ordering back end.
But, marketing isn't. I have known bands that have recorded a collection of amazing songs and not have anywhere to go from there. Marketing is very important. DIY marketing is a bad bad idea unless you have a very good idea about it.
Extensively processed music will become a thing of the past. People will play and record on devices that are much cheaper than they do currently. The lower capital costs will enable them to better weather rampant piracy, surviving on fans' CD purchases, some legitimate online sales, and concert revenues.
It's a marketing campaign made by the cheap recording gear makers. It is NOT TRUE.
Extensive processing can be done by anyone with the computer.
However, before extensive processing comes, we need a very basic thing - a good room, a good instrument, a good microphone. It's very very expensive to make a good room, buy good equipment and microphones - plus, using them requires training and experience.
Without a good basic sound to start from, all the processing done on the computer will not sound good.
Imagine buying a drive like this that comes pre-installed with every song ever produced by WEA or EMI or Sony/Columbia. Say, everything from 1925 onward. How much would you pay for such a drive?
You can always sample higher and add more channels. Try 192Khz at 32 bits per sample in 6.1 channels. And, of course, lossless compression or WAV files for pristine sound.
What good is the entire song ever made by the big 4 if it sounds like crap in stereo 128 kbps.
Or, ALL the movies ever made by (name your favourite) movie studio between (date x) and (date y).
The HD-DVD/bluray is 2 megapixel resolution while real film can go to 10 megapixel and that's 30-50GB per film. You can barely even store 1000 movies in your disk with bluray data rate. Barely possibly 100 with true film quality resolution.
Oh, puhlease. "legitmate market to get it" These people won't pay a friggin' dime. There's no "black market" as that assumes payment. Hint: even black marketeers demand money. These people simply engage in wholesale rip-off.
You're assuming that payment must be made in terms of $s.
Online money leaves a lot of trails and it's not easy to exchange money electronically without giving away your identity or leaving a paper trail behind.
The online black market does not correspond exactly to a real black market. The payments and rewards methods are different but they do exist.
Bands could do the recording themselves. I have a few instruments and some recording hardware (now I just need talent). All said, under $1500. Sure, the quality isn't nearly as good as using a professional studio and hiring people who know what they're doing, but it's possible.
That is a big misconception - it's the industry marketing saying buy an entire studio for $400 in this gizmo, buy the entire line of all classic guitar amps and effects in this box for $100. I did a lot of research on the product of small studios and they all sound like crap. No matter how much talent the artist has, if the sound has some faults (it's very very very easy to make those) it will be unlistenable.
Plus, no matter how cheap the software to record and the hardware to convert signals get, the most important part of a good sound is a good room and that is not cheap at all. Plus, the mastering station needs a very good listening room as well. Just not possible to make a good studio unless you spend a bit of money and have really talented engineers.
If we drop the idea of record labels completely (as there'd be a "major" label or two even if they were all tiny relative to what's there now), advertising and distribution could be word of mouth, online advertising, and so forth. It'd be very possible for a band to gain a huge following. Note that just because we hypothetically go back a century or two to the idea of no record labels doesn't mean we can't use everything else (such as Google ads, personal web sites, MySpace and its Flash audio streamer, and so forth) that's around today.
Then, it's the same old story. The band is well known not because of musical talent but because of marketing skill. We're worse off since the large music companies at least had the incentive to talent scout. Now, the biggest advertiser will get the biggest market share. And, they will aggressively keep new bands from coming up after they've made it.
Actually, Radiohead in their interview are very supportive of large labels.
When their first album came out ( and before Creep blew-up ), they made no money but the label paid for a full tour of Europe even though the labels would lose a lot of money for doing the tour.
Basically, the label paid for a young band to play music and tour, sort of paid for their education.
They say that if they weren't on a rich label, the tour wouldn't have been possible, the exposure to get the song Creep heard wouldn't have been possible.
And, without big labels it's impossible for the bands to really invest in paying a decent studio to record, mix and master their CD and hire engineers by themselves. I just don't see how there can be a mega-band without a major record label company.
If an item does not sell, the seller will probably list it again giving more money to eBay. (Most of the time, for small items, the listing fees are higher than sale fees).
The first statement is false. For tax year 2007, the personal exemption is $3400 and the standard deduction is $5350 for single filers. Thus, at least the first $8750 of income is effectively exempt from taxation. Your other two statements are correct, but in my personal experience it's unusual for TA/RA stipends to approach that amount.
MIT stipend is "science and engineering doctoral students who have passed qualifying exams to a salary of $2121 per month and master's students to $1939 per month." ( http://www-tech.mit.edu/V126/N8/8stipends.html ) That's about $9,000-$10,000 per semester which goes over the personal exemption on a semester alone. Then, there are 3 semesters per year which a graduate student can be employed.
In fact, stipends *are* exempt from Social Security taxes, provided that one works fewer than 20 hours a week, and only while regular classes are in session.
You're right on that. But, federal, state and city taxes still have to be paid and the non-immigrant student is not expected to use social security in the future so it's fair I suppose. On the other hand, filing that non-resident alien form loses a few tax benefits - the one thing that pops to mind is the President Bush's tax refund wasn't available for non-resident tax filers.
What's the point of selling FLAC? You can just get the raw 44.1 Khz samples from the CD itself. And, FLAC doesn't play in mp3 players like iPod etc.
What would be really cool would be 24 bit 96 khz (or higher) FLAC files for sale on online sites - and please no $5 per song, $1 a song. Maybe even promote 5.1 mixes and none of the peak mashing on CDs. Just a different mix for audiophile listeners.
Since for the most part they can't legally work, they generally pay no income taxes.
You pay no income tax only if you don't have income. TA/RA stipend is income and taxed. On campus work is taxed.
If they are allowed to work, they usually receive only a token wage as a research or teaching assistant; anyone who's ever TA'd knows you don't make enough to incur any tax liability.
The stipend is same for everyone and is advertised on the department website.
Such jobs are normally exempt from payroll taxes as well, though in some states they may be subject to unemployment taxes. In the rare cases in which these students do incur income tax liability, they are required to pay at the same rates as anyone else (and their earnings may or may not also be taxed by their own governments).
I think that may be a good thing. You don't' need millions to produce good music and may mean that instead of a lottery mentality in artists you'd have more of a real natural industry. Instead of 90% going to the super stars and 10% divided over the desperate numbers of struggling artists you might have a profession where you could actually live off playing music without having to be a superstar or have a second job.
I don't think this will happen ( I wished it would but I don't think it will).
The record companies have completely dismantled all infrastructure for this kind of environment.
1. The local band is touted in your local free rag or the school newspaper but there isn't anything bigger in most places. The journalism on those papers are terrible and probably feature bands that the newspaper editor knows or is a relative of. It's not based on merit. Beyond the local rag, there is nowhere higher to go until you hit major industry controlled national mags. The magazines are not interested in new talent at all. The British music journalism scene seems much much better.
2. The record label you can sign to and make a living is astronomically far away. There is self-production which you have to cut so many corners that the end result is un-listenable music - mostly because of lack of engineering or studio time. 99% of local band music sounds terrible because of the lack of proper studio time and engineering. Self-promotion is a waste of time - when going against TV and internet promotions.
3. There is no hierarchy to rise to. You either are a struggling local band or signed to a huge label.
A old guy was telling me that before if you knew some band who was good, sooner or later they would get somewhere. But, in the modern environment, there was no where for them to go but oblivion playing local bars.
Slashdot Mirror
Good for the American economy and bad for them. Plus, it's not like you really expect Nigerian open source programmers contributing. Look at China. You see any open source programmers from China?
Who cares? OLPC was about an idea and motivating design concepts in laptops. That worked magically. Yeah, we had all the talk about helping children in 3rd world countries but it was more about spurring new ideas and design techniques in the US skill base. Where were all the designs done for the system?
Those OLPC laptop innovations will probably creep into the laptop you buy 4 years down the road.
There is an episode in DS9 where they create an army like that.
Stop with the n00b posts.
Your genius index is the sum of the inverse of the acceptance ratio of the conference your paper was accepted to plus the sum of the status of the research journal (e.g. transactions) you published an article on plus a certain function of where your last university affiliation was ( e.g. Phd or post-doc ).
That is for n00b stuff.
Teaching in the modern world has come down to pay .edu organization X to get some guy to blah blah in front of you for 50 minutes 3 times a week.
They are not hired for their status - they are hired because they will teach their graduate students who will in turn become good researchers and so on. Undergraduate classes are just a cash cow for universities. Nobody cares about the UG stuff - esp. not the students. Give them an A and they will think the teacher teaches wonderfully.
I spend $715 on rent every month. I guess I can live for $300 in a crummy studio. Why spend extra?
For example, Presonus Firebox and Firepod. Not just support but proper latency support I guess ( if I can so bold to demand them )
The USB keyboards ( like M-Audio keystations and others ).
It would be really sweet to work on audio in Linux for us CS geeks ( write scripts for audio effects rather than knobs and bars in weird custom interfaces ).
It's exchange of ideas if you're a musician or a record producer.
OK. I'm guessing that you're already assuming that the band owns a house or the property for the room. Otherwise, it's 5-10K just for the rent per year.
You're also assuming that the person building the room will have full knowledge of room acoustics and sound proofing material and such.
Plus, what does decent room mean? There is no way to quantify what a decent room is. There could be a problem that without professional advice could not be found. The end product is the music which is multi-track, goes through mics, preamps, analog to digital converters, and then through back out a speaker system in maybe a different acoustic environment recording instruments with all different peculiarities. How are you possibly going to figure out the problem or track it down without extensive knowledge?
Why would there be a growing segment of marketers for these kinds of bands?
The local band scene thing is dead. Bars have crappy PAs destroyed years ago by all the smoke and they charge high cover charges.
It's risky to buy a CD from a local band since it have some production flaw. One CD I bought had something wrong with it - it always sound tinny and made me want to vomit but comparing side by side with other albums it was fine but listing it the whole way through, there was something wrong with it. Most of the times you can just tell that it's shitty instruments or shitty mics or shitty rooms or all of the above. Recoding good music is a black art and not an exact science right now.
You need a very good room first - a room where the sound doesn't bounce around in any frequency range.
You don't make a warehouse into a concert hall and start booking orchestras and selling tickets. The acoustics must be taken into consideration. Otherwise, it will sound like you're recording under water, or recording in a tin can or recording inside a sewer depending on the room structure.
Yes, 10,000 can get decent equipment. $2000-$3000 for 2 good mics, $1000 for drum mics, $2000-$3000 for good preamps, $2000 for a good EQ. Plus, cables, stands etc etc. But, after you get all of that, it's not going to record by itself. There is a lot of knowledge that is required to make a good recording. Just buying a copy of Visual C++ doesn't mean that a major software can just be reproduced.
I have found out that most are shitty engineers and it's very hard to find good engineers. YOu need big money to hire good engineers or good luck to hire good engineers before they are famous.
But, marketing isn't. I have known bands that have recorded a collection of amazing songs and not have anywhere to go from there. Marketing is very important. DIY marketing is a bad bad idea unless you have a very good idea about it.
It's a marketing campaign made by the cheap recording gear makers. It is NOT TRUE.
Extensive processing can be done by anyone with the computer.
However, before extensive processing comes, we need a very basic thing - a good room, a good instrument, a good microphone. It's very very expensive to make a good room, buy good equipment and microphones - plus, using them requires training and experience.
Without a good basic sound to start from, all the processing done on the computer will not sound good.
You can always sample higher and add more channels. Try 192Khz at 32 bits per sample in 6.1 channels. And, of course, lossless compression or WAV files for pristine sound.
What good is the entire song ever made by the big 4 if it sounds like crap in stereo 128 kbps.
The HD-DVD/bluray is 2 megapixel resolution while real film can go to 10 megapixel and that's 30-50GB per film. You can barely even store 1000 movies in your disk with bluray data rate. Barely possibly 100 with true film quality resolution.
Maybe someone just forgot his/her password or don't want to login in library computers.
You're assuming that payment must be made in terms of $s.
Online money leaves a lot of trails and it's not easy to exchange money electronically without giving away your identity or leaving a paper trail behind.
The online black market does not correspond exactly to a real black market. The payments and rewards methods are different but they do exist.
Check this site out:
http://www.sonycard.sony.com/sonygateway/gateway.aspx?offerlink=iklipze
Proper encoder settings.
Bitrate isn't the only parameter an encoder takes.
That is a big misconception - it's the industry marketing saying buy an entire studio for $400 in this gizmo, buy the entire line of all classic guitar amps and effects in this box for $100. I did a lot of research on the product of small studios and they all sound like crap. No matter how much talent the artist has, if the sound has some faults (it's very very very easy to make those) it will be unlistenable.
Plus, no matter how cheap the software to record and the hardware to convert signals get, the most important part of a good sound is a good room and that is not cheap at all. Plus, the mastering station needs a very good listening room as well. Just not possible to make a good studio unless you spend a bit of money and have really talented engineers.
Then, it's the same old story. The band is well known not because of musical talent but because of marketing skill. We're worse off since the large music companies at least had the incentive to talent scout. Now, the biggest advertiser will get the biggest market share. And, they will aggressively keep new bands from coming up after they've made it.
Actually, Radiohead in their interview are very supportive of large labels.
When their first album came out ( and before Creep blew-up ), they made no money but the label paid for a full tour of Europe even though the labels would lose a lot of money for doing the tour.
Basically, the label paid for a young band to play music and tour, sort of paid for their education.
They say that if they weren't on a rich label, the tour wouldn't have been possible, the exposure to get the song Creep heard wouldn't have been possible.
And, without big labels it's impossible for the bands to really invest in paying a decent studio to record, mix and master their CD and hire engineers by themselves. I just don't see how there can be a mega-band without a major record label company.
If an item does not sell, the seller will probably list it again giving more money to eBay. (Most of the time, for small items, the listing fees are higher than sale fees).
I don't know what you're talking about but that's one funny line.
Chinese restaurants are perfect for you.
Most owners do not allow the waitstaff to take tips but rather consider tips as restaurant income and the waitstaff is only given a certain wage.
No matter how many times you don't leave a tip, the waiters in Chinese restaurants aren't going to be mean to you.
And, don't give the money directly to them. They will be too scared to take it with them and will just give it to the restaurant owner.
MIT stipend is "science and engineering doctoral students who have passed qualifying exams to a salary of $2121 per month and master's students to $1939 per month." ( http://www-tech.mit.edu/V126/N8/8stipends.html ) That's about $9,000-$10,000 per semester which goes over the personal exemption on a semester alone. Then, there are 3 semesters per year which a graduate student can be employed.
You're right on that. But, federal, state and city taxes still have to be paid and the non-immigrant student is not expected to use social security in the future so it's fair I suppose. On the other hand, filing that non-resident alien form loses a few tax benefits - the one thing that pops to mind is the President Bush's tax refund wasn't available for non-resident tax filers.
What's the point of selling FLAC? You can just get the raw 44.1 Khz samples from the CD itself. And, FLAC doesn't play in mp3 players like iPod etc.
What would be really cool would be 24 bit 96 khz (or higher) FLAC files for sale on online sites - and please no $5 per song, $1 a song. Maybe even promote 5.1 mixes and none of the peak mashing on CDs. Just a different mix for audiophile listeners.
Would start a whole new excitement around music.
You pay no income tax only if you don't have income. TA/RA stipend is income and taxed. On campus work is taxed.
The stipend is same for everyone and is advertised on the department website.
No they are not exempt!
YOu are making stuff up.
I don't think this will happen ( I wished it would but I don't think it will).
The record companies have completely dismantled all infrastructure for this kind of environment.
1. The local band is touted in your local free rag or the school newspaper but there isn't anything bigger in most places. The journalism on those papers are terrible and probably feature bands that the newspaper editor knows or is a relative of. It's not based on merit. Beyond the local rag, there is nowhere higher to go until you hit major industry controlled national mags. The magazines are not interested in new talent at all. The British music journalism scene seems much much better.
2. The record label you can sign to and make a living is astronomically far away. There is self-production which you have to cut so many corners that the end result is un-listenable music - mostly because of lack of engineering or studio time. 99% of local band music sounds terrible because of the lack of proper studio time and engineering. Self-promotion is a waste of time - when going against TV and internet promotions.
3. There is no hierarchy to rise to. You either are a struggling local band or signed to a huge label.
A old guy was telling me that before if you knew some band who was good, sooner or later they would get somewhere. But, in the modern environment, there was no where for them to go but oblivion playing local bars.