Almost any step taken to reduce and penalize those who would choose to drive drunk or while intoxicated would be an improvement. Just over two years ago, I lost my newlywed wife of 110 days to a drunk driver who drove against traffic on a highway, at highway speeds himself. I'm not after pity or blood, but it'd be great to know that there's SOMETHING we can do to help stop drunks from getting behind the wheel and killing people and maiming them [ my leg was also broken fairly severely in the accident ]. I can't go into tons of detail for pending legal issues, but this involved a fairly unrepentant repeated drunken driver with multiple offenses in multiple states. This may not seem like a real problem to you, but I'm a fellow geek, 29, with my hopes and dreams of a long life with a great wife dashed by the careless, wreckless, wantonly disrespectful to life choices made by a person who should not have had a car after drinking and driving so repeatedly. Taking a license isn't enough, as it wasn't with him. Taking a car could possibly result in him taking another car. However, if cars were all equipped with anti-start technology as described and has been available for some time, accidents caused by people like that could be sometimes averted, because it would make it much harder to actually get in what amounts to a lethal weapon in the hands of those not mentally or physically able to handle it correctly. Keep in mind the same normal people who might have to pay marginally more for a car, or for a retrofit would also gain the societal benefit of fewer drunks on the road and potentially longer lives and fewer losses like mine. This is not pie in the sky ideas, but a very real proposition that could do real good with a minimal impact to population. That to me seems like a real societal good. I'm not advocating trading liberty for security, I'm trading a small payment for some sense of it.
I take issue with the premise, especially with quality microphones, preamps, AD converters and recording gear. It also makes you independent of venue issues, so that when the power goes out or there's a dead channel in the board, you just keep rolling tape [ or hard drive ]. I was proud to record just such a show on June 8th 2003 of Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, available for free download in shorten format over at Archive.org's Audio site. please avail yourself of the chance to download a few of the thousands of hours of quality live recordings, most of which are recorded on good quality mic's, and the recordings DON'T suck. then let your ears tell you whether or not the 4 kHz, and consequently additional frequencies guaranteed by the Nyquist theorem add anything to your listening. Otherwise, why would professional recordists use it for years, hmm? Enjoy!
I'd only say to counter this that in my nearly 9 years of taping, i see only about 10% of the units being used to record concerts are minidisc. It's not a lossless recording mechanism, and still requires too much attention and "flips" [ swapping media ]. 48 kHz is the standard at which most 16 bit recording is done by competent tapers who care about the archival and continuing sonic value of the music which they are mastering.
Jamie Lutch on the laptop-tapers group on yahoo groups has done extensive testnig of this unit, and it cannot support live recording due to dropped samples. It's not reliable enough for most tapers to be willing to not use DAT.
What of the possibility of music downloads based on quality? I offer as a suggestion that if someone wants to purchase, for instance, a FLAC copy of a song, in lossless compression, at say, 80 cents per song [ making most average albums at around 8-10 dollars, a price point that has worked well to stimulate demand in the past ]... but someone else might only want an OGG or MP3 in a lesser quality [ lossy compression = lower quality! ], at perhaps say, 192 bitrate, for approximately 40 cents a track. If we're only getting a percentage of the bits, why are consumers asked to pay roughly the same as for professionally mastered audio data? A typical MP3 or OGG is roughly 1/4 to 1/10 the size of the original audio file, meaning 75-90% of the data has been discarded, yet the price for downloads on for-pay systems is such that consumers pay for the full price of the full quality file. We're in effect paying for bits we didn't receive and cannot reproduce with accuracy! I would advocate a system in which the price per track was directly related to the quality of the track downloaded. This would encourage more try before you buy, and even give a bone to the RIAA's member firms in terms of SOME compensation for their tracks? Why haven't we heard any type of investigation or interest by the RIAA firms in this type of system? Thanks for your time!
From commercial radio interests? Not likely, but that's not really the question. It does open up significant opportunities for community and public interest based radio stations, local churches and other religious and civic organizations to be able to broadcast to their local citizens without having to pander to commercial media groups, and will probably spawn a new and excellent wave of college radio stations. My alma mater chose to go AM to avoid the problems with getting FM spectrum when I was on the action committee to restore student-run college radio, but I think all would like to go to FM for things like, oh, say, the fact that's it's stereo and easier to get on widely-available receiver devices like clock radios and walkmen.
In that way, it means that there could well be a proliferation of options, some of which might appeal to the poster's and to other's tastes... At least I hope it does. I'd love to see radio stations popping up that just broadcast to say, the local township they're in, and may only do so for a few hours a day, but offer programming of civic meetings, or churches to be able to broadcast to their shut-ins [making them feel like they're less isolated and alienated from the people they want to worship with], or for people to become interested in radio in general again, and not solely what the new act, Clear Channel and the Marketroids tell us to enjoy. High schools may even be able to offer broadcast curricula now, if there's interest in it, or perhaps have the FM Club to go with Key Club, Civitans, the Chess Club, and other activities, which enrich kids... Which might further increase "good" radio.
Here-Here on the Flecktones recommendations. Specifically, if I were just getting exposed to their music, I'd recommend Live Art and Left of Cool. I enjoy all their others as well, and apparently, according to stagetalk this tour, their Triple album "Little Worlds" is due out in august of 2003, and it's a studio album, not even a live one!
Charlie Hunter is an amazing young jazz "guitarist" [ it's an 8 string, which offers some interesting tonality and playing styles ]. Personally, I really like his Charlie Hunter Quartet and Natty Dread which is a wonderful jazz reimagining of the classic Bob Marley album. He's got a neat album called Songs from the Analog Playground which features a ton of guests like Norah Jones and Theryl DeClouet.
I can't say this name often enough to people want to know where jazz could be heading, at least for the "keyboard trio" lineup. Medeski Martin & Wood. They do it all. Dance, trance, hop, jive, swing-y stuff, sometimes even on the same album. Specific recommendations: Friday Afternoon in the Universe if only for the amazing "Chinoiserie" as well as the title track, and right now, I'm spinning Uninvisible a lot. It's got some oddities and strange MMW humor [ like a cut featuring some spoken word stuff from Col Bruce Hampton, called "You Are Snake Anthony" and the pingpong match recorded for "Off the Table" as a backdrop for the rest of the tune ], but it's also got some amazing DJ work from DJ Olive and DJ Logic among others, mixed into live jazz [ and they do this on stage as well, done live, so it's not "just a sample" ].
If you like your jazz funky, try some of Stanton Moore, who I think used to be in the New Orleans-based Klezmer All-Stars, and now drums for the uber-funky Galactic. He's got two solo project albums called All Kooked Out! and Flyin' the Koop, both of which are excellent [ although I'm partial to the more recent Flyin' the Koop ].
I haven't seen any John Scofield mentionings as well. Uberjam and especially A-Go-Go [ featuring the members of aforementioned Medeski Martin and Wood as the backing band ]. Scofield bridges between the Davis/Coltrane era and the modern era of post-fusion craziness.
Also, a recent discovery of what could be a jazz supergroup almost... MoDeReKo [Modereko.com], composed of former Phil and Friends drummer John Molo, [former] founding member John D'Earth, and Bobby Read of Bruce Hornsby's backing band, amazing guitarist Tim Kobza and now adding the keys of JT Thomas and bassist Dan Conway... it's just great stuff. They completed a recent tour, and finished their 2nd album, featuring acoustic loop guitar nutjob Keller Williams [ who is indeed amazing ]. They have a self-titled album out now, which little tight explorations of stuff that they improvise around in a live setting.
for the saxophone geek in me, I do love Jeff Coffin's amazing sax work. Pick up a copy of his newest "Mu'tet" album called Go Round when you go see the flecktones this summer.
It's a great question for others too. Music's a great way to code or work by too, and I do listen to all the above, frequently while doing so!
I find myself in the same boat. Sure I can buy furniture from a store or ikea or something, but it's more fun to make it onesself, to have the high-touch time and the personal satisfaction of crafting it well, yourself. That comes from several of my non-computer hobbies like woodworking, homebrewing [ i'm not all the good, but it's a worthy effort ], jewelry making, and audio recording [ although i dove back into doing it high-tech-ly with a laptop instead of my old DAT decks in the last few months. ]
I've been thinking recently about this "high touch" sort of aspect of geekness in the last year or so. I moved from the "city" I lived in [ Winston Salem, NC ], to a sort of rural-ish "suburb" [ Lewisville, NC ] a couple of years ago. My next door neighbor and landlord is across the pond from me, up the road I have a horsefarm, 2 miles away is a vineyard, and there's simply a lot of farming going on out here. I find that I love the smells and while I don't "work the land", it's really comforting to drive home, sunroof open and be able to have the sensory information that comes from living in the "country" with the sights, sounds of animals and trees, the smells and mostly just the touch of good green earth nearby. It's made me wonder if there might be many geeks who choose to do significant hobbies that require this sense of touch that one doesn't get from a keyboard, this sense of connection with the surrounding world that is not specifically represented by bits. Are folks who were subject to the dot-com bust now thinking of changing careers to something that does require more handson work but still appeals to the analytical way the geeks like us tend to work mentally? I'm not negating the computer experience, but curious if there's a complementary experience that we seek because we realize that we miss it. Could *that* be part of the reason for the growth of cooking and home decor and remodeling and all the other hobbies and interests we have? Just a thought...
Speaking as a "clueless audiophile wannabe," and hobbyist concert recordist, I can confirm that this is a hotly awaited product in our community of fan tapers of concerts. We're longing to replace our dying or at least decaying DAT technology with something that can handle higher fidelity recording in the field. This product is a) small, b) beefy spec'd, c) flexible for individual needs. My needs as a taper are largely satisfied by 24 bits @ 48 kHz, but someone else may want to use 24/96 or 24/88.1. This product is FLEXIBLE to allow individual audiophiles to make up their own minds.
Many others have cited minidiscs, but they're compressed audio, period, using lossy compression algorithms developed in a closed environment, not even like Ogg, where the compression is openly developed so that those that actually care about good sound can improve on it.
There is no appreciable diffference on your car cd player, or is there? Even from my recording laptop, where I record at 24/48, I'm able to hear the difference at 24/48 to 16/44.1, for one thing, the Nyquist theorem guarantees other frequences above 22.1 kHz up to 24 kHz that are within the audible range of humans. Don't forget harmonic overtones either!
Why else would we want the extra bits and kHz? You cannot make a good CD to play on a standard player without a superb source recording. That's the reason that wellmade CD's sound wellmade, they actually use GOOD recording techniques, including higher bitrates and higher sampling rates in the studios. When I record a concert [ legally, think people like Medeski Martin & Wood, John Scofield, or Charlie Hunter ], I do so, knowing full well my distribution to folks will be using a 16/44.1, but my source is 24/48. Why the extra work? Because, when i dither down, I let my software choose the best bits to be used, and an antialias filter for the recorded version at 44.1 The resulting recording is far better than my sources with my 16/48 or 16/44.1 versions on my trusty DA-P1 DAT deck that I once used, and far better than friends who use minidiscs or analog cassette.
What Len and others have done is satisfy a legitimate demand in the marketplace. I, for one, am looking forward to it, and no, we won't be using a 512 stick of storage, more likely the 4 GB model at a reasonable bit/sample rate, of something liek 24/48 or 24/96. I've got no relationship to Coresound other than as a previous customer of his establishment, and a happy one at that.
BTW, since we're lobbing ad hominem attacks at "clueless audiophile wannabes," here's a retort... Your use of minidisc demonstrates your cluelessness regarding field and stationary based recording technology. You need look no further than well-established online groups like DAT-heads and Etree.org, as well as new groups like Archive.org/audio, and yahoogroups' laptop-tapers group to see the fallacy in using minidisc for high quality source recordings. Minidisc is simply not a well-thought out choice for your argument.
Something perhaps lost in all of this gravitation towards technology is that some cultures do have built-in checks against the overwhelming of Pandora's Technology Box. Classic example: the Amish. Some think Amish folk are quaint, or a curiosity. Really, though, they are people who actively make choices about how far they want various types of technology to come into their community, because that's what they wish to preserve, is their sense of community.
Example, they don't reject phones in general, but rather than be interrupted from their daily work, they choose a community type phone that is not part of their household. Children also actively choose to be part of the lifestyle. It's wellknown that there is a two year experimental period in which all Amish teens make a choice about whether to remain in the Amish lifestyle, or to become part of the "monoculture." Personally, I find this fascinating and enlightening, that a culture will pick and choose what it wants, based on the merit of the technology or behavior as it is relevant to the community. It's not a particularly capitalistic idea on its face, but in some ways, it is a market economy of relevance. And perhaps, even a way out of the hyperconsumerism a lot of slashdotters want to reject. If we think about how our choices affect the community, and that process is made a part of the economic decisions we make, as well as the technology decisions, ultimately may be better made.
Differerent Codices/Codec's[?] for different uses
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I'm a taper, and a converter of live recorded music, so for this purpose, I'll record the original DAT tape of a show to hard drive, split the rather large wav file to tracks, then burn an audio cd for listening, and a SHORTEN disc or discs for archival purposes. It's a lot cleaner, and more bit-perfect for archival use to extract a check-summed [ md5 ] file using a series of shorten files, than to extract audio from the disc. Too much jitter.
For listening at work, or while mowing the yard, I use MP3, since we have idiotic Novell desktop policies that prevent us from using any non-approved executable. The only thing I've got is Windows Media Player, piece of crap it may be, but it's there. Even winamp is disallowed in our office, for which there's a SHN plugin, even!
DAT isn't dead at all. It flourishes not only in the professional arena, but is well-represented in the artist-recording community and the "Tapers" community.
If you've been to a Phish, Dave Matthews Band, Eddie from Ohio, Agents of Good Roots, or Medeski Martin Wood show, etc then you may have seen a group of folks with mic's flying in the air, recording the show for posterity, onto DAT. While DAT is by no means a suitable medium for long-term archival, it's great for actual recording. No flips or swaps of media for about 2-3 hours, depending on tape length. Thanks to manufacturers like Sony and Maxell and Fuji, as well as vendors like Terrapin Tapes and Tape House and others, we have a stable and ready supply of blank DAT media.
Additionally, for artists, who don't have the budget to plunk down for a large block of expensive studio time, or the funds to drop on an ADAT unit, recording to DAT can be at cost-effective way to self-produce albums. Big Head Todd & the Monsters' Midnight Radio was recorded in such a manner, relatively inexpensively. Everything's original self-produced album Sol*id was also recorded using some material collected from their engineer's live DAT recordings of their early shows.
The RIAA's draconian "Audio" dat tax, as well as requirement that "non-professional" decks have SCMS, effectively killed it for the consumer market. Professional decks can be had for less than 500 bucks these days though, putting it near the range of high-end consumers, as well as close to MiniDisc prices, with NO compression, no flips every 74 minutes, and a larger taping community with lower media cost per unit.
The point is that DAT as a technology isn't dead (in fact new decks have been created in the last couple of years, and soundcard makers are building S/PDIF and AES/EBU i/o into their cards for transfer from DAT for Prosumers), it's merely become a "niche" technology, used by artists and tapers. Until portable harddrives which are capable of loss-less, skip-less recording with decent battery life and multiple sampling rates are built and reasonably priced, I'm sticking with DAT for my taping needs.
While I take issue with the word "bootlegged" regarding CD's, Shorten does compress at a ballpark 2:1 ratio. Most people with whom I'm involved use it to save cd's we ship to each other in trading fair-use recordings, such as live performances from artists who allow taping. The kind folks over at etree.org maintain a thorough FAQ. The developers of Shorten have versions for Win9x, WinNT, Linux/BSD/*nix, BeOS i think, and there's even been a push to develop a WinAMP plug-in for it.
One key issue that's vital to us in the live recording trading community is the lossless compression. MP3 is just not good enough for the DAT-head and other audiophiles among us, since it's by very nature a lossy compression algorithm, chopping off key bands of audio information. Shorten avoids that by not cutting any audio information. True, it does not compress as much, thus making download times longer, but that's no excuse for sloppy sounding audio.
A while back, I discovered csoft.net through a/. banner ad. Love 'em. Billed quarterly, cheap and effective. Domain-named accounts as low as US$10/month. If you just want a personal account with some space and lots of CGI, PHP etc access, it's all there for US$5. They're based in canada, and VERY supportive of open-source, which includes their own servers. All BSD and Linux. Shell, several addresses, redirectors, etc. Check out http://www.csoft.net, for more details. They're knowledgeable and helpful. When I've needed service, my contact has always been available. Uptime is quite impressive for a smaller outfit. I don't have anything negative to say about them, and their policy on hosting is quite liberal, which is refreshing. Disclaimer: I have no business relationship with them as far as equity or anything, I'm just a happy customer, although you may feel free to mention my name as a referral. wink wink.
Also, I do have to give a shout-out to some friends of mine at Meticulous.com, who do bangup jobs of running database-driven sites using open-source technology, such as Nancies.org, the fan-based Dave Matthews Band site, and Viber.net, the Agents of Good Roots' fan-site. Good peeps. Ask for Bobo/John or Waldo.
a few points of fact and a suggestion to the AC looking for cheaper DAT media:
For the record, DAT isn't dead. It's still produced, including new models. Sony recently made several new "consumer" level models under $1k, the D100 and the M1. Tascam, Teac, HHb, and others make new ones, and continue to sell the old ones.
You can make unlimited analog copies of the digital recording, but of course, it's no longer purely digital and as such, subject to generational loss of quality. This is what makes SCuMS so insidious.
DATs are far cheaper than 15.99 a pop. Not sure what options are available to Aussies, but in the states, there are several good shops which sell at very low costs. I don't work for them, but I'm a happy customer of Terrapin Tapes, which sells DAT, cassettes, and CD-R media at reasonable costs, catering to the tapers of live music. A 60m DAT from Maxell, the HS-4, runs 2.90. 90m is 3.00. Similarly low prices are available from other vendors. They may ship out of country, but if not, find a US person who might be willing to order, and then ship to you, far cheaper than the AUD$15.99. in the UK, Kao still sells some of their Kao GOLD DAT's, which were a staple among the DAT-trading comminity for years.
In the US, the DMCA makes SCMS-standalone strippers illegal, as they are devices purely designed to remove the SCMS copy protection. However, the AC didn't point out that MOST DAT decks either have the option to disable SCMS, ignore it, or disable it automatically. I own a Tascam DA-P1, which ignores SCMS, and my Tascam DA-20 has a setting to set SCMS bits to 00. The DA-20 is a fairly low-cost model as well, not more than 50% more than a home MiniDisc unit with a Toslink digital output, and this uses RCA Coax S/PDIF standard.
In short, DAT's not really dead, but it has gone into a niche market, catering to high end audiophiles, tapers of live music, musicians themselves, and audio and film professionals.
DAT still flourishes in another community, tapers and sound professionals. SDMI has had no bearing on us, but we still seek devices without, or which can disable SCMS. These exist, but generally cost more than similar devices without this ability.
As far as the original question, Consumers have and will determine what is bought. For every, hey, look clueless consumers at what we've created just for you-type product which has succeeded, there are a zillion DIVX-style failures which cost the developers millions. I'm personally skipping out on buying an SDMI device, but as a DAT-head, I find the quality of most MP3s to be lacking.
I finished the Dune series, the whole thing, by Frank Herbert. It may seem repetitive after the first couple, or a bit confusing. Keep reading, it makes sense later. The new prequel series by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson poses to be wonderful, at least from the first book,House Atreides. There are some sexual themes, tones of religious antagonism, and political antipathy, but it's balanced and useful reading. For a pre-teen or young teen, this is probably more tame than many of their choices on their own.
Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere is more modern, but is a great story. If anything, it whetted my appetite for more Gaiman. There's very little sexual content, and excellently disguised moral lessons, which are NOT pedantic or preachy.
Asimov's whole dang Foundation series. Like Dune, it can get a bit repetitive, but once completed, it's one of those mind-melting door-openers to understanding.
um... Cryptonomicon, anyone?
A Canticle for Leibowitz. Here here... so much sci-fi refers to this novel, it has to be read. Elements of Babylon 5 even refer to this! Not to mention the fact that it's a great read.
The Princess Bride. fantasy satire. It should fit right in with the sarcasm and irony so beloved by a large number of teenage folks. Funny for adults too.
A series for later, The Vampire Chronicles, from Anne Rice. Sexual content, sexual fantasy, or at least the undertones of them both, are part and parcel of the story. Mostly, it's very beautiful eroticism, with occasional flashes of violence. Also, there are religious undertones, including some thoughts of how to handle the Satan Problem, in Memnoch the Devil. It's worth reading however, to allow doubt to strengthen faith, or simply to allow people to think for themselves. While you're at it, I really enjoyed Servant of the Bones when I picked it up last fall too.
Not a classic, but fun reading, especially if you're fans of the show, but the novelizations based on JMS's outlines, which became "The Psi Corps Trilogy" are really fun, and quick reads, with lots of things to go back to later. Events leading up to Bester's birth, his early and middle life, and finally, how it ends. Good story construction, beginning, middle, end, with lots of twists, and good reading level. I also highly recommend To Dream in the City of Sorrows which deals with Catherine Sakai, Michael Sinclair, and Marcus Cole, as well as a few other remembered characters from the show. It stands alone from the series very well, and is perhaps my favorite B5 novel. None of these are based on a particular episode, but place the characters in the story at different points of time in the "B5 Universe." This is fun reading while stuck at home during a saturday snowstorm.
Doesn't really fit with Science Fiction, per se, but Ayn Rand's fiction focused on reason, particularly, Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, and The Fountainhead are worthwhile reading. There is some sexual content, including a rape, but it's crucial to the story's development, and offers a great chance to discuss the implications of everyone's actions in the web of living. It's probably better reading to allow to simmer for a few years while you read all the other suggestions.
It's not just the availability and ubiquity of paper as a medium that drives many folks to print out everything.
It's more a function of users wanting to do one of three things:
Be clueless and avoid using technological means of viewing storage.
Avoid unreliable storage or retrieval mechanisms, which lead to lost data, lost time, and lost profits or enjoyment.
Take it with them. Paper while heavier than a Palm after a certain point, is lighter for just a few things, and can slide into a suitcase, backpack, etc, without fear of breakage or low battery power.
Wearable or otherwise more portable computing mechanisms might encourage less use of the print queues, but until users become more accustomed to the means, and until the technology involved becomes more reliable, users simply won't trust the network.
In addition, Sony has the distinction of being one of the most anti-taping labels around, if only through their WORK nameprint, which services folks like Jamiroquai and Fiona Apple. They also control Ben Harper and Barenaked Ladies. Many of these artists treat fan not-for-profit/fair-use taping as free advertising. David Schools of Widespread Panic was astonished when they first began to play Colorado after playing small clubs in the southeast as a "Dead Covers band" and people at the concerts would mouth/sing the lyrics to the songs.
Artists like Phish, Dave Matthews Band, and of course, the Grateful Dead, took the example of early bluegrass artists and allowed folks to bring in their own recording equipment and record concerts for their own archives. People like me would take these recordings and trade them at no profit for either other recordings or blanks and postage to our friends or others who request them. It's a concept I've been involved in for several years, and what initially attracted me to Open Source.
At any rate, Sony fights all taping, and generally throws in language in artists' contracts forbidding even recording themselves for their own archival and study[never hurts for a band to be able to bone up on old material or see how they sounded x years ago.] We can only hope that other labels like RCA [ granted, they're a BMG label, but they have a clue on taping, with artists like Bruce Hornsby, DMB, Agents of Good Roots and Vertical Horizon, which are all pro-taping and have it in writing in their contacts from what I understand!] have some effect on the industry as a whole and discourage Sony from more restrictive ideas like no taping, SCMS [ bleah! ], or SDMI, not to mention the opposition of artists to control their own destinies with regard to their operations on the net.
"Who are you?What do you want?Why are you here?Where are you going?"-JMS
"Crutcher asks: Not sure how to phrase this, but, well, what is the status of O'Reilley and marketing books to schools and colleges for use as textbooks. Our textbooks suck, and if there textbook versions of ya'lls books it would rock."
What's interesting is that some places are beginning to use their books. For instance, as a newbie to Perl, I'm taking the HWG.org class starting on Sept 20, for Beginning Programming with Perl, which uses the ORA Learning Perl book that's so popular with slashdotters. From a cursory glance through some of the other courses, there do appear to be some of ORA's excellent books used as texts. There's hope after all!
I use the USPS almost daily. Useful for stuff like ebay and amazon auctions, shipping my O'Reilly books to me, and all the tape trading. Over the last several years, I've joined the nuts who record and trade [ at no profit! ]concerts. Think of the audio geeks at Phish or Dead shows. That's me, except I don't much like Phish, and never got to see the Dead. Think Agents of Good Roots or Everything (e:). Having used the USPS for shipping and receiving for over 5 years, I've never had a package lost or didn't get one I should've. Plus, you can ship a DAT tape for 55 cents.
While if the gov't enhanced competition for the postal service, costs *might* go down [this might be a good candidate for a natural monopoly.], I doubt that UPS, FedEx, Airborne Express, or anyone else could match that price for a LONG time. For now, until DAT-quality audio can traverse the internet in less time than it takes the show to record [MP3 doesn't cut it.], I'll stick to the postal service.
Actually, not being able to track packages isn't quite accurate. You can track any priority mail item, if you choose the delivery confirmation method. Checkable via their 800 number and via their website. I've used it before, for shipping a $2000 microphone set and preamp. Got to Hot-lanta safe and sound.
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Almost any step taken to reduce and penalize those who would choose to drive drunk or while intoxicated would be an improvement. Just over two years ago, I lost my newlywed wife of 110 days to a drunk driver who drove against traffic on a highway, at highway speeds himself. I'm not after pity or blood, but it'd be great to know that there's SOMETHING we can do to help stop drunks from getting behind the wheel and killing people and maiming them [ my leg was also broken fairly severely in the accident ]. I can't go into tons of detail for pending legal issues, but this involved a fairly unrepentant repeated drunken driver with multiple offenses in multiple states. This may not seem like a real problem to you, but I'm a fellow geek, 29, with my hopes and dreams of a long life with a great wife dashed by the careless, wreckless, wantonly disrespectful to life choices made by a person who should not have had a car after drinking and driving so repeatedly. Taking a license isn't enough, as it wasn't with him. Taking a car could possibly result in him taking another car. However, if cars were all equipped with anti-start technology as described and has been available for some time, accidents caused by people like that could be sometimes averted, because it would make it much harder to actually get in what amounts to a lethal weapon in the hands of those not mentally or physically able to handle it correctly. Keep in mind the same normal people who might have to pay marginally more for a car, or for a retrofit would also gain the societal benefit of fewer drunks on the road and potentially longer lives and fewer losses like mine. This is not pie in the sky ideas, but a very real proposition that could do real good with a minimal impact to population. That to me seems like a real societal good. I'm not advocating trading liberty for security, I'm trading a small payment for some sense of it.
I take issue with the premise, especially with quality microphones, preamps, AD converters and recording gear. It also makes you independent of venue issues, so that when the power goes out or there's a dead channel in the board, you just keep rolling tape [ or hard drive ]. I was proud to record just such a show on June 8th 2003 of Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, available for free download in shorten format over at Archive.org's Audio site. please avail yourself of the chance to download a few of the thousands of hours of quality live recordings, most of which are recorded on good quality mic's, and the recordings DON'T suck. then let your ears tell you whether or not the 4 kHz, and consequently additional frequencies guaranteed by the Nyquist theorem add anything to your listening. Otherwise, why would professional recordists use it for years, hmm? Enjoy!
I'd only say to counter this that in my nearly 9 years of taping, i see only about 10% of the units being used to record concerts are minidisc. It's not a lossless recording mechanism, and still requires too much attention and "flips" [ swapping media ]. 48 kHz is the standard at which most 16 bit recording is done by competent tapers who care about the archival and continuing sonic value of the music which they are mastering.
Jamie Lutch on the laptop-tapers group on yahoo groups has done extensive testnig of this unit, and it cannot support live recording due to dropped samples. It's not reliable enough for most tapers to be willing to not use DAT.
What of the possibility of music downloads based on quality? I offer as a suggestion that if someone wants to purchase, for instance, a FLAC copy of a song, in lossless compression, at say, 80 cents per song [ making most average albums at around 8-10 dollars, a price point that has worked well to stimulate demand in the past ]... but someone else might only want an OGG or MP3 in a lesser quality [ lossy compression = lower quality! ], at perhaps say, 192 bitrate, for approximately 40 cents a track. If we're only getting a percentage of the bits, why are consumers asked to pay roughly the same as for professionally mastered audio data? A typical MP3 or OGG is roughly 1/4 to 1/10 the size of the original audio file, meaning 75-90% of the data has been discarded, yet the price for downloads on for-pay systems is such that consumers pay for the full price of the full quality file. We're in effect paying for bits we didn't receive and cannot reproduce with accuracy! I would advocate a system in which the price per track was directly related to the quality of the track downloaded. This would encourage more try before you buy, and even give a bone to the RIAA's member firms in terms of SOME compensation for their tracks? Why haven't we heard any type of investigation or interest by the RIAA firms in this type of system? Thanks for your time!
From commercial radio interests? Not likely, but that's not really the question. It does open up significant opportunities for community and public interest based radio stations, local churches and other religious and civic organizations to be able to broadcast to their local citizens without having to pander to commercial media groups, and will probably spawn a new and excellent wave of college radio stations. My alma mater chose to go AM to avoid the problems with getting FM spectrum when I was on the action committee to restore student-run college radio, but I think all would like to go to FM for things like, oh, say, the fact that's it's stereo and easier to get on widely-available receiver devices like clock radios and walkmen.
In that way, it means that there could well be a proliferation of options, some of which might appeal to the poster's and to other's tastes... At least I hope it does. I'd love to see radio stations popping up that just broadcast to say, the local township they're in, and may only do so for a few hours a day, but offer programming of civic meetings, or churches to be able to broadcast to their shut-ins [making them feel like they're less isolated and alienated from the people they want to worship with], or for people to become interested in radio in general again, and not solely what the new act, Clear Channel and the Marketroids tell us to enjoy. High schools may even be able to offer broadcast curricula now, if there's interest in it, or perhaps have the FM Club to go with Key Club, Civitans, the Chess Club, and other activities, which enrich kids... Which might further increase "good" radio.
Here-Here on the Flecktones recommendations. Specifically, if I were just getting exposed to their music, I'd recommend Live Art and Left of Cool. I enjoy all their others as well, and apparently, according to stagetalk this tour, their Triple album "Little Worlds" is due out in august of 2003, and it's a studio album, not even a live one!
Charlie Hunter is an amazing young jazz "guitarist" [ it's an 8 string, which offers some interesting tonality and playing styles ]. Personally, I really like his Charlie Hunter Quartet and Natty Dread which is a wonderful jazz reimagining of the classic Bob Marley album. He's got a neat album called Songs from the Analog Playground which features a ton of guests like Norah Jones and Theryl DeClouet.
I can't say this name often enough to people want to know where jazz could be heading, at least for the "keyboard trio" lineup. Medeski Martin & Wood. They do it all. Dance, trance, hop, jive, swing-y stuff, sometimes even on the same album. Specific recommendations: Friday Afternoon in the Universe if only for the amazing "Chinoiserie" as well as the title track, and right now, I'm spinning Uninvisible a lot. It's got some oddities and strange MMW humor [ like a cut featuring some spoken word stuff from Col Bruce Hampton, called "You Are Snake Anthony" and the pingpong match recorded for "Off the Table" as a backdrop for the rest of the tune ], but it's also got some amazing DJ work from DJ Olive and DJ Logic among others, mixed into live jazz [ and they do this on stage as well, done live, so it's not "just a sample" ].
If you like your jazz funky, try some of Stanton Moore, who I think used to be in the New Orleans-based Klezmer All-Stars, and now drums for the uber-funky Galactic. He's got two solo project albums called All Kooked Out! and Flyin' the Koop, both of which are excellent [ although I'm partial to the more recent Flyin' the Koop ].
I haven't seen any John Scofield mentionings as well. Uberjam and especially A-Go-Go [ featuring the members of aforementioned Medeski Martin and Wood as the backing band ]. Scofield bridges between the Davis/Coltrane era and the modern era of post-fusion craziness.
Also, a recent discovery of what could be a jazz supergroup almost... MoDeReKo [Modereko.com], composed of former Phil and Friends drummer John Molo, [former] founding member John D'Earth, and Bobby Read of Bruce Hornsby's backing band, amazing guitarist Tim Kobza and now adding the keys of JT Thomas and bassist Dan Conway... it's just great stuff. They completed a recent tour, and finished their 2nd album, featuring acoustic loop guitar nutjob Keller Williams [ who is indeed amazing ]. They have a self-titled album out now, which little tight explorations of stuff that they improvise around in a live setting.
for the saxophone geek in me, I do love Jeff Coffin's amazing sax work. Pick up a copy of his newest "Mu'tet" album called Go Round when you go see the flecktones this summer.
It's a great question for others too. Music's a great way to code or work by too, and I do listen to all the above, frequently while doing so!
I find myself in the same boat. Sure I can buy furniture from a store or ikea or something, but it's more fun to make it onesself, to have the high-touch time and the personal satisfaction of crafting it well, yourself. That comes from several of my non-computer hobbies like woodworking, homebrewing [ i'm not all the good, but it's a worthy effort ], jewelry making, and audio recording [ although i dove back into doing it high-tech-ly with a laptop instead of my old DAT decks in the last few months. ]
I've been thinking recently about this "high touch" sort of aspect of geekness in the last year or so. I moved from the "city" I lived in [ Winston Salem, NC ], to a sort of rural-ish "suburb" [ Lewisville, NC ] a couple of years ago. My next door neighbor and landlord is across the pond from me, up the road I have a horsefarm, 2 miles away is a vineyard, and there's simply a lot of farming going on out here. I find that I love the smells and while I don't "work the land", it's really comforting to drive home, sunroof open and be able to have the sensory information that comes from living in the "country" with the sights, sounds of animals and trees, the smells and mostly just the touch of good green earth nearby. It's made me wonder if there might be many geeks who choose to do significant hobbies that require this sense of touch that one doesn't get from a keyboard, this sense of connection with the surrounding world that is not specifically represented by bits. Are folks who were subject to the dot-com bust now thinking of changing careers to something that does require more handson work but still appeals to the analytical way the geeks like us tend to work mentally? I'm not negating the computer experience, but curious if there's a complementary experience that we seek because we realize that we miss it. Could *that* be part of the reason for the growth of cooking and home decor and remodeling and all the other hobbies and interests we have? Just a thought...
Speaking as a "clueless audiophile wannabe," and hobbyist concert recordist, I can confirm that this is a hotly awaited product in our community of fan tapers of concerts. We're longing to replace our dying or at least decaying DAT technology with something that can handle higher fidelity recording in the field. This product is a) small, b) beefy spec'd, c) flexible for individual needs. My needs as a taper are largely satisfied by 24 bits @ 48 kHz, but someone else may want to use 24/96 or 24/88.1. This product is FLEXIBLE to allow individual audiophiles to make up their own minds.
Many others have cited minidiscs, but they're compressed audio, period, using lossy compression algorithms developed in a closed environment, not even like Ogg, where the compression is openly developed so that those that actually care about good sound can improve on it.
There is no appreciable diffference on your car cd player, or is there? Even from my recording laptop, where I record at 24/48, I'm able to hear the difference at 24/48 to 16/44.1, for one thing, the Nyquist theorem guarantees other frequences above 22.1 kHz up to 24 kHz that are within the audible range of humans. Don't forget harmonic overtones either!
Why else would we want the extra bits and kHz? You cannot make a good CD to play on a standard player without a superb source recording. That's the reason that wellmade CD's sound wellmade, they actually use GOOD recording techniques, including higher bitrates and higher sampling rates in the studios. When I record a concert [ legally, think people like Medeski Martin & Wood, John Scofield, or Charlie Hunter ], I do so, knowing full well my distribution to folks will be using a 16/44.1, but my source is 24/48. Why the extra work? Because, when i dither down, I let my software choose the best bits to be used, and an antialias filter for the recorded version at 44.1 The resulting recording is far better than my sources with my 16/48 or 16/44.1 versions on my trusty DA-P1 DAT deck that I once used, and far better than friends who use minidiscs or analog cassette.
What Len and others have done is satisfy a legitimate demand in the marketplace. I, for one, am looking forward to it, and no, we won't be using a 512 stick of storage, more likely the 4 GB model at a reasonable bit/sample rate, of something liek 24/48 or 24/96. I've got no relationship to Coresound other than as a previous customer of his establishment, and a happy one at that.
BTW, since we're lobbing ad hominem attacks at "clueless audiophile wannabes," here's a retort... Your use of minidisc demonstrates your cluelessness regarding field and stationary based recording technology. You need look no further than well-established online groups like DAT-heads and Etree.org, as well as new groups like Archive.org/audio, and yahoogroups' laptop-tapers group to see the fallacy in using minidisc for high quality source recordings. Minidisc is simply not a well-thought out choice for your argument.
Something perhaps lost in all of this gravitation towards technology is that some cultures do have built-in checks against the overwhelming of Pandora's Technology Box. Classic example: the Amish. Some think Amish folk are quaint, or a curiosity. Really, though, they are people who actively make choices about how far they want various types of technology to come into their community, because that's what they wish to preserve, is their sense of community.
Example, they don't reject phones in general, but rather than be interrupted from their daily work, they choose a community type phone that is not part of their household. Children also actively choose to be part of the lifestyle. It's wellknown that there is a two year experimental period in which all Amish teens make a choice about whether to remain in the Amish lifestyle, or to become part of the "monoculture." Personally, I find this fascinating and enlightening, that a culture will pick and choose what it wants, based on the merit of the technology or behavior as it is relevant to the community. It's not a particularly capitalistic idea on its face, but in some ways, it is a market economy of relevance. And perhaps, even a way out of the hyperconsumerism a lot of slashdotters want to reject. If we think about how our choices affect the community, and that process is made a part of the economic decisions we make, as well as the technology decisions, ultimately may be better made.
I'm a taper, and a converter of live recorded music, so for this purpose, I'll record the original DAT tape of a show to hard drive, split the rather large wav file to tracks, then burn an audio cd for listening, and a SHORTEN disc or discs for archival purposes. It's a lot cleaner, and more bit-perfect for archival use to extract a check-summed [ md5 ] file using a series of shorten files, than to extract audio from the disc. Too much jitter.
For listening at work, or while mowing the yard, I use MP3, since we have idiotic Novell desktop policies that prevent us from using any non-approved executable. The only thing I've got is Windows Media Player, piece of crap it may be, but it's there. Even winamp is disallowed in our office, for which there's a SHN plugin, even!
I'd use ogg if I could, however.
DAT isn't dead at all. It flourishes not only in the professional arena, but is well-represented in the artist-recording community and the "Tapers" community.
If you've been to a Phish, Dave Matthews Band, Eddie from Ohio, Agents of Good Roots, or Medeski Martin Wood show, etc then you may have seen a group of folks with mic's flying in the air, recording the show for posterity, onto DAT. While DAT is by no means a suitable medium for long-term archival, it's great for actual recording. No flips or swaps of media for about 2-3 hours, depending on tape length. Thanks to manufacturers like Sony and Maxell and Fuji, as well as vendors like Terrapin Tapes and Tape House and others, we have a stable and ready supply of blank DAT media.
Additionally, for artists, who don't have the budget to plunk down for a large block of expensive studio time, or the funds to drop on an ADAT unit, recording to DAT can be at cost-effective way to self-produce albums. Big Head Todd & the Monsters' Midnight Radio was recorded in such a manner, relatively inexpensively. Everything's original self-produced album Sol*id was also recorded using some material collected from their engineer's live DAT recordings of their early shows.
The RIAA's draconian "Audio" dat tax, as well as requirement that "non-professional" decks have SCMS, effectively killed it for the consumer market. Professional decks can be had for less than 500 bucks these days though, putting it near the range of high-end consumers, as well as close to MiniDisc prices, with NO compression, no flips every 74 minutes, and a larger taping community with lower media cost per unit.
The point is that DAT as a technology isn't dead (in fact new decks have been created in the last couple of years, and soundcard makers are building S/PDIF and AES/EBU i/o into their cards for transfer from DAT for Prosumers), it's merely become a "niche" technology, used by artists and tapers. Until portable harddrives which are capable of loss-less, skip-less recording with decent battery life and multiple sampling rates are built and reasonably priced, I'm sticking with DAT for my taping needs.
One key issue that's vital to us in the live recording trading community is the lossless compression. MP3 is just not good enough for the DAT-head and other audiophiles among us, since it's by very nature a lossy compression algorithm, chopping off key bands of audio information. Shorten avoids that by not cutting any audio information. True, it does not compress as much, thus making download times longer, but that's no excuse for sloppy sounding audio.
Also, I do have to give a shout-out to some friends of mine at Meticulous.com, who do bangup jobs of running database-driven sites using open-source technology, such as Nancies.org, the fan-based Dave Matthews Band site, and Viber.net, the Agents of Good Roots' fan-site. Good peeps. Ask for Bobo/John or Waldo.
In short, DAT's not really dead, but it has gone into a niche market, catering to high end audiophiles, tapers of live music, musicians themselves, and audio and film professionals.
As far as the original question, Consumers have and will determine what is bought. For every, hey, look clueless consumers at what we've created just for you-type product which has succeeded, there are a zillion DIVX-style failures which cost the developers millions. I'm personally skipping out on buying an SDMI device, but as a DAT-head, I find the quality of most MP3s to be lacking.
I finished the Dune series, the whole thing, by Frank Herbert. It may seem repetitive after the first couple, or a bit confusing. Keep reading, it makes sense later. The new prequel series by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson poses to be wonderful, at least from the first book,House Atreides. There are some sexual themes, tones of religious antagonism, and political antipathy, but it's balanced and useful reading. For a pre-teen or young teen, this is probably more tame than many of their choices on their own.
Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere is more modern, but is a great story. If anything, it whetted my appetite for more Gaiman. There's very little sexual content, and excellently disguised moral lessons, which are NOT pedantic or preachy.
Asimov's whole dang Foundation series. Like Dune, it can get a bit repetitive, but once completed, it's one of those mind-melting door-openers to understanding.
um... Cryptonomicon, anyone?
A Canticle for Leibowitz. Here here... so much sci-fi refers to this novel, it has to be read. Elements of Babylon 5 even refer to this! Not to mention the fact that it's a great read.
The Princess Bride. fantasy satire. It should fit right in with the sarcasm and irony so beloved by a large number of teenage folks. Funny for adults too.
A series for later, The Vampire Chronicles, from Anne Rice. Sexual content, sexual fantasy, or at least the undertones of them both, are part and parcel of the story. Mostly, it's very beautiful eroticism, with occasional flashes of violence. Also, there are religious undertones, including some thoughts of how to handle the Satan Problem, in Memnoch the Devil. It's worth reading however, to allow doubt to strengthen faith, or simply to allow people to think for themselves. While you're at it, I really enjoyed Servant of the Bones when I picked it up last fall too.
Not a classic, but fun reading, especially if you're fans of the show, but the novelizations based on JMS's outlines, which became "The Psi Corps Trilogy" are really fun, and quick reads, with lots of things to go back to later. Events leading up to Bester's birth, his early and middle life, and finally, how it ends. Good story construction, beginning, middle, end, with lots of twists, and good reading level. I also highly recommend To Dream in the City of Sorrows which deals with Catherine Sakai, Michael Sinclair, and Marcus Cole, as well as a few other remembered characters from the show. It stands alone from the series very well, and is perhaps my favorite B5 novel. None of these are based on a particular episode, but place the characters in the story at different points of time in the "B5 Universe." This is fun reading while stuck at home during a saturday snowstorm.
Doesn't really fit with Science Fiction, per se, but Ayn Rand's fiction focused on reason, particularly, Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, and The Fountainhead are worthwhile reading. There is some sexual content, including a rape, but it's crucial to the story's development, and offers a great chance to discuss the implications of everyone's actions in the web of living. It's probably better reading to allow to simmer for a few years while you read all the other suggestions.
It's more a function of users wanting to do one of three things:
Wearable or otherwise more portable computing mechanisms might encourage less use of the print queues, but until users become more accustomed to the means, and until the technology involved becomes more reliable, users simply won't trust the network.
Artists like Phish, Dave Matthews Band, and of course, the Grateful Dead, took the example of early bluegrass artists and allowed folks to bring in their own recording equipment and record concerts for their own archives. People like me would take these recordings and trade them at no profit for either other recordings or blanks and postage to our friends or others who request them. It's a concept I've been involved in for several years, and what initially attracted me to Open Source.
At any rate, Sony fights all taping, and generally throws in language in artists' contracts forbidding even recording themselves for their own archival and study[never hurts for a band to be able to bone up on old material or see how they sounded x years ago.] We can only hope that other labels like RCA [ granted, they're a BMG label, but they have a clue on taping, with artists like Bruce Hornsby, DMB, Agents of Good Roots and Vertical Horizon, which are all pro-taping and have it in writing in their contacts from what I understand!] have some effect on the industry as a whole and discourage Sony from more restrictive ideas like no taping, SCMS [ bleah! ], or SDMI, not to mention the opposition of artists to control their own destinies with regard to their operations on the net.
"Who are you?What do you want?Why are you here?Where are you going?"-JMS
What's interesting is that some places are beginning to use their books. For instance, as a newbie to Perl, I'm taking the HWG.org class starting on Sept 20, for Beginning Programming with Perl, which uses the ORA Learning Perl book that's so popular with slashdotters. From a cursory glance through some of the other courses, there do appear to be some of ORA's excellent books used as texts. There's hope after all!
I use the USPS almost daily. Useful for stuff like ebay and amazon auctions, shipping my O'Reilly books to me, and all the tape trading. Over the last several years, I've joined the nuts who record and trade [ at no profit! ]concerts. Think of the audio geeks at Phish or Dead shows. That's me, except I don't much like Phish, and never got to see the Dead. Think Agents of Good Roots or Everything (e:). Having used the USPS for shipping and receiving for over 5 years, I've never had a package lost or didn't get one I should've. Plus, you can ship a DAT tape for 55 cents.
While if the gov't enhanced competition for the postal service, costs *might* go down [this might be a good candidate for a natural monopoly.], I doubt that UPS, FedEx, Airborne Express, or anyone else could match that price for a LONG time. For now, until DAT-quality audio can traverse the internet in less time than it takes the show to record [MP3 doesn't cut it.], I'll stick to the postal service.
Actually, not being able to track packages isn't quite accurate. You can track any priority mail item, if you choose the delivery confirmation method. Checkable via their 800 number and via their website. I've used it before, for shipping a $2000 microphone set and preamp. Got to Hot-lanta safe and sound.