They did not need IP law, as to copy anything was extremely expensive and time consuming.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to typeset a book by hand? Or to paint a reproduction of a picture? Or to get an orchestra together to learn and play a piece of music?
You could not just anonymously get a copy off the pirate bay.
There were less people doing it too. It would be bloody obvious who made the copy, and who made the original. I bet you that people had their own, perhaps violent, ways of resolving these issues even if it was not coded into the law.
The situation nowadays is completely different. The way artists and audiences interact is by mass distribution of recorded media, which is impractical without IP laws.
"And I hope one day to be able to say with pride, "I recorded, mixed, and mastered this project all in Linux, using nothing but FOSS!"."
Some people already can.
I think it depends on what you want to do. For projects where it's straight forward recording, like live music, then Ardour on Linux is fine. Particularly if you still use a mixing desk/outboard fx. The sound quality is only limited by your A/D converters.
For composing in the computer, with soft synths and samples etc, Cubase and Ableton rule. Until Ardour gets midi there is no competition. Seq24 on Linux is still a lot of fun though.:)
Games are harder to pirate than music and films. Therefore more games are sold.
Games are large in terms of data, and cannot be lossily compressed like mp3/DIVX. Games have strong copy protection. Games need to be cracked, which is an uncertain process and often conflicts with patches/updated content.
I think the innovation here is that they are using pre-polarised diaphragms to avoid the high voltages used in previous electrostatic speakers. They are a little like electret mics driven in reverse.
By the way, Magnaplanar speakers are not actually electrostatic. They use a coil and a magnet, just like a conventional speaker.
In the video, it appears the paper is covered in tiny electrostatic speakers. They mention a pre polarised diaphragm. It is electret, rather than externally polarised, as that lets them use much lower voltages.
I don't think anyone has made an electret speaker before. High voltage electrostatic speakers are easy to find though.
It is probably fairly efficient, but requires a lot of transducers, and their small size means no bass.
"It never fails to surprise how unimaginative visionaries can be."
Perhaps with the kind of music he was playing, distortion would have sucked. It works best musically with fewer musicians and small arrangements with simple harmonic structures. Go much beyond a major chord and fuzz starts to sound bad. There is too much dissonance and it sounds too messy.
It used to be the job of the brass section to give you that harmonically rich sound!
Once bands became three/four piece, and guitarists stopped playing all those complicated chords they could use fuzz on guitar and not take up all the space where the other musicians live!
The reason for this is that there are no reports or evidence of any kind anywhere that the hijackers had box cutters.
It's far more likely they were carrying combat knives. The box cutter myth was started to explain how they carried the knives through airport security.
"If a user can't be bothered to check what comes in the version of a product they are buying (whether it is a cell phone plan or an operating system), then they deserve whatever they get. "
You don't quite get it.
You talk as if there was a single version which they are evaluating, in which case they would deserve what they got.
With confusion marketing, there are many subtly different versions, and the user has to make a *comparative* evaluation. If there are enough versions, the effort to evaluate *all* of them before buying becomes unreasonable.
"All of these should metaphorically scream, "This is not safe!""
I don't entirely agree with this.
Dialog boxes are not consistent enough to assume this. Why should I be expected to know which dialog boxes are safe on a which particular version of Windows? They look different in 98,XP,2K,Vista etc.
So I need to know how to pick up subtle clues about graphic design for a particular version of windows, know if Aero is on or off, the theme and background used etc.
Expecting the user to keep mental records of the particular 'windows de jour' error boxes and pick out subtle clues in dialogs is an awful way to maintain security. Something is severely wrong here and I don't think you can blame it all on the user.
Websites being flagged as 'primary content' or 'referenced content'.
There are millions of sites which are just advertising, reviews, online shops, lists of links to other sites etc. These are 'referenced content'. They are effectively useless most of the time when you want to know something.
Sites that stand on their own, and contain useful information like wikipedia, oldcomputers.com, and any site dedicated to a particular subject should be 'primary content'. It does not matter if they are true, or truthy, only that the web site should actually contain the information it purports to be about. So if a site purports to be about 'second world war u-boats', if it is a primary content site, then it should contain some information about them, rather than advertising for shoes and watches.
It would be wonderful to be able to just search the sites on the net that actually contain useful information and not pointless trash.
When DAT first appeared, there were no cheap CD burners. You either mastered to 1/4 inch tape or to cassette.
DAT was incredibly useful to studios and production houses as: It was high quality. Literally identical backup copies became possible. The media was cheap. Some players supported timecode so you could sync to picture or vice versa. Up to 180 minutes of recording time, about three times longer than a CD. Or 6 hours in LP mode.
It was a revolution at the time. The only alternative was some horrible lash up with video recorders and A/D converters that I don't really want to remember. Or early computer digital, which mostly sounded awful, was unreliable, and you'd still have to archive to magnetic tape or optical WORM drives as hard drives were tiny and expensive.
There is nothing inherently better about the sound, as the data they contain is identical to a normal CD.
There could be an improvement if the CD and the CD player are in such bad condition that you are getting E32 errors (unrecoverable by the usual reed-solomon error correction). It's debatable whether even these are audible as the missing sample would be interpolated.
Another way might be to reduce servo jitter from tracking. This might be audible if the power supply is rubbish and the player is badly designed.
The problem is that both these scenarios would only happen with very low end players and dirty or scratched CDs, so the playback equipment would be so awful as to make any comparison of fidelity pointless.
"No, Britney will NOT do. Britney is a talentless bimbo. John Lee Hooker will do (he never got airplay either). Led Zeppelin will do. Tchaikovsky will do. Merl Haggard will do. Bob Marley will do. The Pietasters will do. The Dead Kennedys will do."
Go and listen to 'Toxic' by Britney. One of the greatest pop songs of all time, and me, a muso and all my muso friends agree on that. I have listened to and written more interesting and eclectic music than most people will hear in their lifetimes, but I can also tell a good pop tune when I hear it.
It does not matter one bit who she is, that she did not write it, and whether she even sang on it or not, it's still a great song.
It also represents the standard of songwriting and production that most musicians will never attain. Writing and recording good commercial pop is hard, really hard.
It used a film like cinema film, but covered with opaque mecuric sulphide, and a cutting head to scrape away the coating. Apart from using a vertical cut with an oblique head, rather than a lateral one, the principle is the same. Apparently it was actually pretty good quality!
This is something that can, and has, been empirically tested.
If you do a double blind test with the direct signal from the turntable compared to the same through 16bit 44.1KHz digital ad/da conversion, people cannot tell the difference. In any properly set up and level matched trial. Ever.
The problem is that the vinyl believers cannot accept this, and either will not try it, or do not have the facilities to do a proper test themselves.
Just because something is popular it does not mean that it's creators should not be rewarded for it. If someone has created a work of art that is liked enough to become popular culture, and interesting enough that people want to discuss it, why should that mean it is worthless? It's not as though it's any cheaper to produce just because it's low brow entertainment. Quite the opposite most of the time.
I still think you are being snobbish. Many people spend their entire lives only enjoying art that you might consider crap, but their lives are enriched by it.
Should there be a cultural referendum where art is divided into 'crap' and 'good' and only the good stuff charged for? It would be impossible as peoples tastes vary so much. Also, much popular entertainment that is considered 'good' nowadays was considered 'crap' when it's creators were alive. Populist throwaway entertainment like the Beatles, Stones, Tshaikovsky etc is often only recognised for it's qualities years later.
"And so will the kids buy the albums one day (maybe 10 years later when they have money), but only for that tiny subset of the shared music which found a place in their soul."
Whaddya mean 'when they have money'. Kids spend ridiculous amounts on computer games, clothes, DVDs, mobile phones etc. The only reason they don't spend the same on music is because they can get it for free, not because they don't think it has value to them.
If it's crap, why are people downloading it, sharing it, whistling and dancing to it?
Your argument boils down to 'because I can get it illegally for free, it's not worth paying for'.
People can live perfectly well without pop music. You don't have a divine right to download as much music as you like just because you feel your tastes are superior to other people's, so refined that only the very very best deserves your unwilling patronage.
The most fascinating one I heard of was a device to give blind people machine assisted vision.
It comprised of a 16x16 matrix of solenoids the user wore on their back. The picture from the camera was translated into varying pressure on the skin depending on the darkness of each pixel. It's low res, but apparently after a while people can 'see' with it.
"or just how hot a commercial sterling solar engine is at the mirror's focal point. "
You had to really stretch to think of something dangerous about solar/sterling engines.:) I would not count the heat as a danger anyway, it's necessary to generate power, not a byproduct like radioactive waste or chemical/particulate pollution.
As far as safe, clean power goes, they are pretty good.
I bet the tingly feeling people are getting is leakage of the high voltage AC from the inverter for the display backlight. A cold cathode light uses about 700 volts AC 50hz at 4ma or so. This would definitely feel tingly. You would not feel 12VDC at all.
"What you are referring to is decompression (attempting to retrieve the original data). CDs are generally *not* decompressed, but there *are* CD players which attempt to decompress the audio with 24-bit, 48kHz DACs and DSPs. A more well-known example of such decompression are upscaling DVD players. They statistically recover data that was removed from the original source."
Both those examples are not decompression, but interpolation. The extra data is guessed at, invented after the fact. It is not present in the original file. There are many ways this can be done, each of which will produce different results. If it was decompression, there would only be one correct way to recover the original data.
If your definition of decompression was correct, then all stored data can be called compressed. The reason for this being that you can always add invented data or interpolate at a later date to produce more values.
This stuff is basic information theory. You can keep upsampling and interpolating as long as you like, but you cannot be sure you are getting any closer to the original data. DVD scaling is the same as the kind of scaling as in graphics software. It's pretty dumb really, and only works on a single frame at a time.
Upsampling in CD players is used to simplify the design of the reconstruction filters rather than to gain information. It's actually impossible to buy a true 16bit 44.1KHz D/A converter chip nowadays, oddly enough, but that's a discussion for another day.
"The problem is you are thinking of compression in the limited scope of the two most common types of compression people talk about on computers: file compression (i.e., zip) and music compression (i.e., MP3). These forms of compression are useless without a complimentary decompression process. However, decompression is not necessary for compression to still occur. For example, if you only had zip, but not unzip, installed on your computer, you could still compress files with zip."
Almost there! Yes, compression always needs a complimentary decompression process. If decompression is not required, then the data is not compressed. You can indeed only have zip installed on your computer, but without unzip you have no way of accessing your files!
"Your experience with compression is too narrow and does not cover other forms of compression. It's like not thinking 3 bean soup is a soup because you've only ever eaten soup with chicken and/or noodles."
I have over fifteen years experience of working professionally with digital sound and video, and have never heard your definition of compression before.
Even if there was some incredible DVD player software, that analysed say, someone's hands in every frame of the film, then was able to increase the perceived resolution by using the information gained when the hands were big in the picture to add detail to the hands in the scenes when the character was further away.... This is still not decompression as you are making assumptions about the nature of reality that will not always be correct. Who's to say the character's hands are always the same?
Slashdot Mirror
They did not need IP law, as to copy anything was extremely expensive and time consuming.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to typeset a book by hand? Or to paint a reproduction of a picture? Or to get an orchestra together to learn and play a piece of music?
You could not just anonymously get a copy off the pirate bay.
There were less people doing it too. It would be bloody obvious who made the copy, and who made the original. I bet you that people had their own, perhaps violent, ways of resolving these issues even if it was not coded into the law.
The situation nowadays is completely different. The way artists and audiences interact is by mass distribution of recorded media, which is impractical without IP laws.
"And I hope one day to be able to say with pride, "I recorded, mixed, and mastered this project all in Linux, using nothing but FOSS!"."
Some people already can.
I think it depends on what you want to do. For projects where it's straight forward recording, like live music, then Ardour on Linux is fine. Particularly if you still use a mixing desk/outboard fx. The sound quality is only limited by your A/D converters.
For composing in the computer, with soft synths and samples etc, Cubase and Ableton rule. Until Ardour gets midi there is no competition. Seq24 on Linux is still a lot of fun though. :)
Games are harder to pirate than music and films. Therefore more games are sold.
Games are large in terms of data, and cannot be lossily compressed like mp3/DIVX. Games have strong copy protection. Games need to be cracked, which is an uncertain process and often conflicts with patches/updated content.
Well, why not?
I think the innovation here is that they are using pre-polarised diaphragms to avoid the high voltages used in previous electrostatic speakers. They are a little like electret mics driven in reverse.
By the way, Magnaplanar speakers are not actually electrostatic. They use a coil and a magnet, just like a conventional speaker.
I'm not sure that it is piezoelectric.
In the video, it appears the paper is covered in tiny electrostatic speakers. They mention a pre polarised diaphragm. It is electret, rather than externally polarised, as that lets them use much lower voltages.
I don't think anyone has made an electret speaker before. High voltage electrostatic speakers are easy to find though.
It is probably fairly efficient, but requires a lot of transducers, and their small size means no bass.
"It never fails to surprise how unimaginative visionaries can be."
Perhaps with the kind of music he was playing, distortion would have sucked.
It works best musically with fewer musicians and small arrangements with simple harmonic structures.
Go much beyond a major chord and fuzz starts to sound bad. There is too much dissonance and it sounds too messy.
It used to be the job of the brass section to give you that harmonically rich sound!
Once bands became three/four piece, and guitarists stopped playing all those complicated chords they could use fuzz on guitar and not take up all the space where the other musicians live!
What has this got to do with creativity?
Before autotune, we'd drop in on the same bit of vocal for hours if need be.
Now, if the spirit of the take is good, but there are a couple of pitch problems, you can fix them without endless retakes taking away the vibe.
I'd say it does the opposite to removing creativity. It liberates artists to let go a little when singing and go for feel over perfection.
They were not afraid of 'box cutters'.
The reason for this is that there are no reports or evidence of any kind anywhere that the hijackers had box cutters.
It's far more likely they were carrying combat knives. The box cutter myth was started to explain how they carried the knives through airport security.
See:
http://edwardjayepstein.com/nether_fictoid9.htm
"If a user can't be bothered to check what comes in the version of a product they are buying (whether it is a cell phone plan or an operating system), then they deserve whatever they get. "
You don't quite get it.
You talk as if there was a single version which they are evaluating, in which case they would deserve what they got.
With confusion marketing, there are many subtly different versions, and the user has to make a *comparative* evaluation. If there are enough versions, the effort to evaluate *all* of them before buying becomes unreasonable.
"All of these should metaphorically scream, "This is not safe!""
I don't entirely agree with this.
Dialog boxes are not consistent enough to assume this.
Why should I be expected to know which dialog boxes are safe on a which particular version of Windows?
They look different in 98,XP,2K,Vista etc.
So I need to know how to pick up subtle clues about graphic design for a particular version of windows, know if Aero is on or off, the theme and background used etc.
Expecting the user to keep mental records of the particular 'windows de jour' error boxes and pick out subtle clues in dialogs is an awful way to maintain security. Something is severely wrong here and I don't think you can blame it all on the user.
Websites being flagged as 'primary content' or 'referenced content'.
There are millions of sites which are just advertising, reviews, online shops, lists of links to other sites etc.
These are 'referenced content'. They are effectively useless most of the time when you want to know something.
Sites that stand on their own, and contain useful information like wikipedia, oldcomputers.com, and any site dedicated to a particular subject should be 'primary content'. It does not matter if they are true, or truthy, only that the web site should actually contain the information it purports to be about.
So if a site purports to be about 'second world war u-boats', if it is a primary content site, then it should contain some information about them, rather than advertising for shoes and watches.
It would be wonderful to be able to just search the sites on the net that actually contain useful information and not pointless trash.
You are forgetting...
When DAT first appeared, there were no cheap CD burners.
You either mastered to 1/4 inch tape or to cassette.
DAT was incredibly useful to studios and production houses as:
It was high quality.
Literally identical backup copies became possible.
The media was cheap.
Some players supported timecode so you could sync to picture or vice versa.
Up to 180 minutes of recording time, about three times longer than a CD. Or 6 hours in LP mode.
It was a revolution at the time. The only alternative was some horrible lash up with video recorders and A/D converters that I don't really want to remember. Or early computer digital, which mostly sounded awful, was unreliable, and you'd still have to archive to magnetic tape or optical WORM drives as hard drives were tiny and expensive.
There is nothing inherently better about the sound, as the data they contain is identical to a normal CD.
There could be an improvement if the CD and the CD player are in such bad condition that you are getting E32 errors (unrecoverable by the usual reed-solomon error correction). It's debatable whether even these are audible as the missing sample would be interpolated.
Another way might be to reduce servo jitter from tracking. This might be audible if the power supply is rubbish and the player is badly designed.
The problem is that both these scenarios would only happen with very low end players and dirty or scratched CDs, so the playback equipment would be so awful as to make any comparison of fidelity pointless.
Why don't they do their blogging live, in the form of public speeches?
Then they could charge people to attend, and also make money off merchandise and selling drinks and snacks.
I mean, people expect other content producers to do this, why not bloggers as well?
"No, Britney will NOT do. Britney is a talentless bimbo. John Lee Hooker will do (he never got airplay either). Led Zeppelin will do. Tchaikovsky will do. Merl Haggard will do. Bob Marley will do. The Pietasters will do. The Dead Kennedys will do."
Go and listen to 'Toxic' by Britney. One of the greatest pop songs of all time, and me, a muso and all my muso friends agree on that. I have listened to and written more interesting and eclectic music than most people will hear in their lifetimes, but I can also tell a good pop tune when I hear it.
It does not matter one bit who she is, that she did not write it, and whether she even sang on it or not, it's still a great song.
It also represents the standard of songwriting and production that most musicians will never attain. Writing and recording good commercial pop is hard, really hard.
A quite similar device was used in the 1930s-40s called the "Philips-Miller Film Recorder".
http://www.btinternet.com/~roger.beckwith/bh/tapes/pm.htm
It used a film like cinema film, but covered with opaque mecuric sulphide, and a cutting head to scrape away the coating. Apart from using a vertical cut with an oblique head, rather than a lateral one, the principle is the same.
Apparently it was actually pretty good quality!
I can't seem to get it working. Perhaps the RT kernels are immune.
.. 0x1000 .. 0x5000 .. 0x2000 .. 0xb7e76000
[+] mmap: 0x0
[+] page: 0x0
[+] page: 0x20
[+] mmap: 0x4000
[+] page: 0x4000
[+] page: 0x4020
[+] mmap: 0x1000
[+] page: 0x1000
[+] mmap: 0xb7e44000
Segmentation fault
uname -a
Linux planet 2.6.22-14-rt #1 SMP PREEMPT RT Mon Oct 15 01:05:51 GMT 2007 i686 GNU/Linux
This is something that can, and has, been empirically tested.
If you do a double blind test with the direct signal from the turntable compared to the same through 16bit 44.1KHz digital ad/da conversion, people cannot tell the difference. In any properly set up and level matched trial. Ever.
The problem is that the vinyl believers cannot accept this, and either will not try it, or do not have the facilities to do a proper test themselves.
Just because something is popular it does not mean that it's creators should not be rewarded for it.
If someone has created a work of art that is liked enough to become popular culture, and interesting enough that people want to discuss it, why should that mean it is worthless?
It's not as though it's any cheaper to produce just because it's low brow entertainment. Quite the opposite most of the time.
I still think you are being snobbish. Many people spend their entire lives only enjoying art that you might consider crap, but their lives are enriched by it.
Should there be a cultural referendum where art is divided into 'crap' and 'good' and only the good stuff charged for? It would be impossible as peoples tastes vary so much. Also, much popular entertainment that is considered 'good' nowadays was considered 'crap' when it's creators were alive. Populist throwaway entertainment like the Beatles, Stones, Tshaikovsky etc is often only recognised for it's qualities years later.
"And so will the kids buy the albums one day (maybe 10 years later when they have money), but only for that tiny subset of the shared music which found a place in their soul."
Whaddya mean 'when they have money'. Kids spend ridiculous amounts on computer games, clothes, DVDs, mobile phones etc. The only reason they don't spend the same on music is because they can get it for free, not because they don't think it has value to them.
If it's crap, why are people downloading it, sharing it, whistling and dancing to it?
Your argument boils down to 'because I can get it illegally for free, it's not worth paying for'.
People can live perfectly well without pop music. You don't have a divine right to download as much music as you like just because you feel your tastes are superior to other people's, so refined that only the very very best deserves your unwilling patronage.
The most fascinating one I heard of was a device to give blind people machine assisted vision.
It comprised of a 16x16 matrix of solenoids the user wore on their back.
The picture from the camera was translated into varying pressure on the skin depending on the darkness of each pixel.
It's low res, but apparently after a while people can 'see' with it.
"or just how hot a commercial sterling solar engine is at the mirror's focal point. "
:)
You had to really stretch to think of something dangerous about solar/sterling engines.
I would not count the heat as a danger anyway, it's necessary to generate power, not a byproduct like radioactive waste or chemical/particulate pollution.
As far as safe, clean power goes, they are pretty good.
How can they sell this skull as a 40,000 year old artifact if they claim it's less than 6000 years old?
I bet the tingly feeling people are getting is leakage of the high voltage AC from the inverter for the display backlight.
A cold cathode light uses about 700 volts AC 50hz at 4ma or so. This would definitely feel tingly.
You would not feel 12VDC at all.
"What you are referring to is decompression (attempting to retrieve the original data). CDs are generally *not* decompressed, but there *are* CD players which attempt to decompress the audio with 24-bit, 48kHz DACs and DSPs. A more well-known example of such decompression are upscaling DVD players. They statistically recover data that was removed from the original source."
Both those examples are not decompression, but interpolation. The extra data is guessed at, invented after the fact. It is not present in the original file. There are many ways this can be done, each of which will produce different results. If it was decompression, there would only be one correct way to recover the original data.
If your definition of decompression was correct, then all stored data can be called compressed.
The reason for this being that you can always add invented data or interpolate at a later date to produce more values.
This stuff is basic information theory. You can keep upsampling and interpolating as long as you like, but you cannot be sure you are getting any closer to the original data. DVD scaling is the same as the kind of scaling as in graphics software. It's pretty dumb really, and only works on a single frame at a time.
Upsampling in CD players is used to simplify the design of the reconstruction filters rather than to gain information.
It's actually impossible to buy a true 16bit 44.1KHz D/A converter chip nowadays, oddly enough, but that's a discussion for another day.
"The problem is you are thinking of compression in the limited scope of the two most common types of compression people talk about on computers: file compression (i.e., zip) and music compression (i.e., MP3). These forms of compression are useless without a complimentary decompression process. However, decompression is not necessary for compression to still occur. For example, if you only had zip, but not unzip, installed on your computer, you could still compress files with zip."
Almost there! Yes, compression always needs a complimentary decompression process. If decompression is not required, then the data is not compressed.
You can indeed only have zip installed on your computer, but without unzip you have no way of accessing your files!
"Your experience with compression is too narrow and does not cover other forms of compression. It's like not thinking 3 bean soup is a soup because you've only ever eaten soup with chicken and/or noodles."
I have over fifteen years experience of working professionally with digital sound and video, and have never heard your definition of compression before.
Even if there was some incredible DVD player software, that analysed say, someone's hands in every frame of the film, then was able to increase the perceived resolution by using the information gained when the hands were big in the picture to add detail to the hands in the scenes when the character was further away.... This is still not decompression as you are making assumptions about the nature of reality that will not always be correct.
Who's to say the character's hands are always the same?