I have one of those Wacom tablets (not a tablet PC, just the USB tablet thing that you use like a mouse). It's really sweet for drawing, mainly because of the pressure sensitive pen. Do tablet PC's pens generally work the same way?
But the "bastardization of the art of music" doesn't matter to the average consumer. This is what the indy music crowd doesn't seem to get. It's not about who has the best music (RIAA or independents). It's about who gets their product out there (everywhere) and brainwashes everyone 24 hours a day. The RIAA does this very successfully, and independents don't. I hate the RIAA, but continue to listen to their music. Why? Look at the choice that I, the average consumer, have:
1) Sit on my lazy ass and let the RIAA bombard me with music all day, every day (radio, TV, whatever). 2) Go and actively search for non-RIAA music by installing some P2P app or subscribing to some website like emusic, and actually pick and choose different music to try and see whether I like it or not.
This is why the RIAA wins, and will continue to win. If you want to defeat the RIAA, you must organize the effort. You've got to get the music out there to the people, not the other way around (make the people find the music). People may want an alternative to the RIAA, but they're not going to jump through hoops for it, plain and simple. Give me a radio station that I can listen to, even if it's just over the Internet for now. Give me a weekly "Top 40 Countdown" of the most popular independent songs. Come on, I'm the average Joe Schmoe, and I need to be spoon fed! Independent artists need to realize that their target audience is not the hi-tech/Slashdot/emusic crowd. It's thirteen year olds and couch potatoes. It's people who think that Yahoo is the Internet and have never typed anything into the "address bar" of their browser. Better yet, it's people who don't even have access to the Internet. Put some effort into reaching those people. Then, and only then, will people start to leave the RIAA. And even then, it will only be a small fraction who'll leave the RIAA behind. But hey, at least it's a start.
Just launching a new website or some new P2P or other music "sharing" technology will accomplish absolutely nothing. There are already enough ways for me to go out and find independent music -- that is not the problem. Come on, let's get it together and beat the RIAA at their own game.
I was just thinking about this the other day. I hate the RIAA more than most, for sure. But I also happen to like the music that's on the radio. So I'm stuck with a decision: 1) Buy the CDs of the music that I like, and watch like 99.999% of that money go to the RIAA, or 2) Download the music for free. Neither option is good, because the artists themselves don't get my money either way. So I thought about maybe downloading the music that I like, then sending a donation to the artist. But that's just a big hassle, and not many of the big-name artists bother to put a "click to donate" button on their pages. I don't want to jump through hoops every time I find a new song I like.
So, I'd like to boycott the RIAA. But the real problem with doing so finally dawned on me -- I don't know else what to listen to! I've been so brainwashed by just letting the radio tell me what to listen to that I'm trained to just like whatever's popular.
Ok, now, pull up a chair, because here comes the real epiphany. If you want to defeat the RIAA, you have to organize the effort. You can't just tell people, "Hey, don't listen to that RIAA Britney Spears crap." It won't work, because the RIAA's product is literally everywhere, constantly bombarding the air waves all over the world. It's just too easy to find something you like. What the anti-RIAA crowd needs is a single, well known, popular source where all the brainwashed zombies like myself can go and just zone out and listen to GOOD independent music. Give us the "Rick Dee's Weekly Top 40" of independent music. Give us the same catchy songs over and over and over again, 24/7. Seriously. If you can do that, I'll leave the RIAA and never look back. And so will lots of other people.
I like the idea of the "zero force" keyboard, but why did they have to make it so hideous looking? Why not just a regular old 101/104 key layout? That weird layout is a big turnoff for me. I don't want to re-learn how to type, I just want a keybard that doesn't get crud between the keys. If they want to offer that "extreme" looking thing to gamers or whatever, in addition to a keyboard with a regular layout for the rest of us, that's cool. But with that thing as their only offering, they're missing a pretty significant potential market, I'd say. Oh, yeah, I see they do also have a "mini" keyboard. Great.
Not to be mean, but the fact that someone would even bother to say something like, "Come to Canada, it's beautiful, it's great, really, etc...," pretty much says it all. No one says "Come check out America for a change! It's really nice here, honest!" That's because Americans are too busy arguing about the constant flood of illegal immigrants and silly passport laws -- like the one in this article -- that are designed to keep people out of the country.
...Photoshop for OSX. However, if you're not running that operating system, fret not, because there is a version for Linux too.
Whew! For a minute, I thought they weren't going to have all of the operating systems covered, but that blurb reassured me.
Wow... flamebait
on
Inside the PSP
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Ok, I guess I should have put the "" tags around that post. Wow. I wasn't actually coming out in support of the DMCA... I was trying to make the point that the DMCA is idiotic, but apparently the moderators didn't get it. My apologies. I will aim lower with the political satire next time.
The sad truth is that this author may actually be in violation of the DMCA.
Who the hell does this author think he is? You cant take apart hardware! You might accidentally learn how to circumvent some form of copy protection! What -- do you actually think you own that hardware just because you paid for it? HAHAHA, not in my country, you COMMUNIST!
The lawyers are en route to your house, big boy. Let the bending and grabbing of ankles commence.
Well said! I've had a similar conversation with various people. When you think about it, this should really be obvious. Yet most fundamentalists have never even had this thought pass through their minds. "The world was created in six days, because that's what Genesis says!" That kind of attitude just provides fuel for the simple-minded mob that believes all religion is bogus.
Kudos to you for sacrificing your karma to say this on Slashdot, too. You'll certainly be modded "flamebait" for suggesting that God exists. But I'm with you, and I'll sacrifice my own karma to back you up.:)
The bottom line, for me, is that worshiping the Bible itself is bad. It was written by men, and if you take it as the undisputable letter of the law, straight from God's mouth, you're making a mistake. Just my opinion of course. But if you can read it with some actual concious thought you just might get some good out of it. And you might realize that maybe Moses wasn't an astrophysicist, and that giving him the details of every event from the big bang through the forming of amino acids in the primordial soup probably wouldn't be very useful.
Several months ago, I posted a similar comment on an article about eMachineShop. (It's a web site where you download their CAD tool, design something, and click "buy," and your custom whatever is delivered right to your door). Yeah, I joked that maybe the AAA would be next in line after the RIAA dn the MPAA. People will soon be trading CAD designs of Ferraris on the web, instead of the latest Eminem track.
Doooood, those look awesome. 400MHz! Where's the Slashdot article on those things?:)
The "Waysmall" PCs are really interesting, but I can't find any info on their HD (or whatever other nonvolatile storage). It says they have 64MB SDRAM and a 4MB flash of some sort. Surely that's not all? What are you going to do with 4MB when the OS probably takes the majority of it?
Still, they are definitely cool. Slap a GB or two of flash or a microdrive onto one of those and you've got something.
Well, if Moore's Law/Theory holds, then we can extrapolate what will happen. Let's say you get your time machine working before the end of this year. Easy enough, right? So you zap yourself into 2039. Since you built the machine, 34 years have passed, which means that somewhere around 23 "doublings" of computer performance-per-dollar have taken place. Computers are now 2^23 = 8,388,608 times more powerful than when you left. Therefore, not only have they become self aware and erased mankind from the Earth, but they have certainly also modified their software to no longer be susceptible to the Y2038 problem. They probably just added a 33rd bit to all their variables... or something. In any case, be absolutely certain to take an EMP burst generator with you. To be on the safe side, fire it off as soon as you arrive. They'll probably be waiting for you.
Tha author just comes out of nowhere with the idea that Google would build huge farms of storage machines just to store everyone's data. Why in the hell would they want to do that? It would be expensive and slow.
Why not just keep the data on the client system, while the applications reside on Google's servers? If I want to run my word processor, I go to gword.google.com and I type away. When I'm done, I click a link that says "Save Document" and that saves a file on my local hard drive. From there I can print it, copy it, grep it, or whatever I want to do with it. So what advantage do I (or Google) gain by having the document saved on their servers? I guess I gain the ability to edit the file from anywhere, but that's hardly justification. I can achieve the exact same thing by putting it on a USB keychain drive, or e-mailing it to myself, or whatever.
Fortunately, judging by their work so far, I'd say that the Google developers are more intelligent than the author of this article.
Even the x86 chip makers are leaving it behind in favour of the x86-64.
x86-64 doesn't leave anything behind. It just adds 64-bit registers and addressing to the existing x86 architecture. It carries all the ugly x86 baggage right along with it. Very similar to the transition from "real mode" (16-bit) to "protected mode" (32-bit), except that x86-64 is actually even less of a transition. Protected mode brought with it lots of new stuff, besides just 32-bit registers and addressing.
I must be in the minority that actually like Flash. It's very effective for adding interactivity and animation to the web. Yes, it's used for lots of ads, but it's also used for lots of really cool (and even useful) sites.
But the idea that it would come bundled with other software is hideous, and the reasons should be obvious. This is the deal breaker for me and many others, I'm sure. It doesn't matter what software is bundled with Flash, the bundling itself is just wrong, in principle. And the timing of this decision couldn't possibly be worse. Google, for example, is showing more and more that rich, interactive sites can be developed without Flash. Turning Flash into mere packaging for third-party software will shift people in droves to javascript/XML alternatives (and whatever else comes along).
I remember the days when RealPlayer used to be really cool... Look at it now -- it's nothing more than packaging for advertisements. It's bad business, plain and simple.
Luckovsky isn't sparing harsh words for his former employer, however, pointing fingers at everything from Microsoft's difficulties in shipping software to its users on time, to its policy of requiring users to validate that they have non-pirated versions of Windows in order to obtain fixes and downloads.
I sure did. Way to go Mark. It's rare that big shots will speak openly about their former employers in a move like this. Granted, there's usually good reason to keep your mouth shut. But it took guts to say that and it really hit close to home, for me at least. Microsoft's validation thing is garbage, and it just makes me angry every time I need to download something.
No kidding. Instead of an "iron man" competition, they should have sort of an "American Idol" style competition, where the readers vote one comic off the island each week. Then someone talented would most likely win. Some of those comics are like an 8 year-old's scribblings.
This looks like a pretty good solution for AirPort users... but I'm looking for the whole enchilada. I want to be able to set up speakers in every room, then have a remote control that controls everything, from any room, and I want it all to be wireless (because I live in an apartment and can't run wires everywhere). And here's the real kicker: I want to be able to have anything and everything as an input -- FM/AM, CD, MP3, Shoutcast, Sirius, even the audio from the TV, or whatever. I know there are lots of products out there that let you stream your MP3s all over the house, but I want to stream everything. Is there a complete audio solution like this that doesn't cost a million dollars?
... please explain how the RIAA in doing this is NOT acting as a monopoly or cartel? As I understood it, price fixing by an industry that is not justified by some external cost increase is explicitly illegal...
I would love to hear an answer to this, also. Even the single-sentence blurb about the story sounds illegal to me:
The major music labels are in talks with music download services attempting to get them to increase the price...
If that doesn't constitute "price fixing" then what does?
And the tune itself is nothing but silence, which seems flawed, as there is only 1 silence by nature itself, doesnt seem logically to be copyrightable
I have to disagree (slightly) with this statement. First of all, if you digitally record silence, depending on how you do it, you won't get all zeros. You'll get some noise, etc... Second of all, even if you did create an audio file and fill it manually with all zeros, you would still have an audio file. It would be a bunch of numbers stored on a hard disk somewhere, which means it would be absolutely the same thing as every other audio file in the world.
Guns-n-Roses_Welcome_to_the_Jungle.wav looks like this:
...9191d51bde5f4ce5f4c2ed5f4dd5f4ac2abc24eb...
Your_audio_file.wav looks like this:
...0000000000000000000000000000000000000000...
The important point is that your "silence" audio file is absolutely no different from any other audio file in the entire world -- it's just a bunch of numbers that represent audio data. So he did, in fact, break the law by copying silence.Therefore, one of two things must be true:
1) This person really did commit a crime, conceptually, by creating one minute and three seconds of silence, and he deserves to be punished, or 2) The copyright system doesn't make any sense in it's current form.
But, the point is that because of the ridiculous copyright laws in this country, someone could sue. And they might even win, based on the precendents set by the RIAA's other lawsuits (e.g. suing 14 year olds and winning).
I think this is a fantastic example of just how nonsensical DRM, the RIAA, and the music industry in general are. Kudos to the guy who thought of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, 100m/day? That's less than 5 meters per hour, or about 70 millimeters per minute. Snails (literally) move faster than that.
I have one of those Wacom tablets (not a tablet PC, just the USB tablet thing that you use like a mouse). It's really sweet for drawing, mainly because of the pressure sensitive pen. Do tablet PC's pens generally work the same way?
But the "bastardization of the art of music" doesn't matter to the average consumer. This is what the indy music crowd doesn't seem to get. It's not about who has the best music (RIAA or independents). It's about who gets their product out there (everywhere) and brainwashes everyone 24 hours a day. The RIAA does this very successfully, and independents don't. I hate the RIAA, but continue to listen to their music. Why? Look at the choice that I, the average consumer, have:
1) Sit on my lazy ass and let the RIAA bombard me with music all day, every day (radio, TV, whatever).
2) Go and actively search for non-RIAA music by installing some P2P app or subscribing to some website like emusic, and actually pick and choose different music to try and see whether I like it or not.
This is why the RIAA wins, and will continue to win. If you want to defeat the RIAA, you must organize the effort. You've got to get the music out there to the people, not the other way around (make the people find the music). People may want an alternative to the RIAA, but they're not going to jump through hoops for it, plain and simple. Give me a radio station that I can listen to, even if it's just over the Internet for now. Give me a weekly "Top 40 Countdown" of the most popular independent songs. Come on, I'm the average Joe Schmoe, and I need to be spoon fed! Independent artists need to realize that their target audience is not the hi-tech/Slashdot/emusic crowd. It's thirteen year olds and couch potatoes. It's people who think that Yahoo is the Internet and have never typed anything into the "address bar" of their browser. Better yet, it's people who don't even have access to the Internet. Put some effort into reaching those people. Then, and only then, will people start to leave the RIAA. And even then, it will only be a small fraction who'll leave the RIAA behind. But hey, at least it's a start.
Just launching a new website or some new P2P or other music "sharing" technology will accomplish absolutely nothing. There are already enough ways for me to go out and find independent music -- that is not the problem. Come on, let's get it together and beat the RIAA at their own game.
I'm wandering off-topic a bit, but...
I was just thinking about this the other day. I hate the RIAA more than most, for sure. But I also happen to like the music that's on the radio. So I'm stuck with a decision: 1) Buy the CDs of the music that I like, and watch like 99.999% of that money go to the RIAA, or 2) Download the music for free. Neither option is good, because the artists themselves don't get my money either way. So I thought about maybe downloading the music that I like, then sending a donation to the artist. But that's just a big hassle, and not many of the big-name artists bother to put a "click to donate" button on their pages. I don't want to jump through hoops every time I find a new song I like.
So, I'd like to boycott the RIAA. But the real problem with doing so finally dawned on me -- I don't know else what to listen to! I've been so brainwashed by just letting the radio tell me what to listen to that I'm trained to just like whatever's popular.
Ok, now, pull up a chair, because here comes the real epiphany. If you want to defeat the RIAA, you have to organize the effort. You can't just tell people, "Hey, don't listen to that RIAA Britney Spears crap." It won't work, because the RIAA's product is literally everywhere, constantly bombarding the air waves all over the world. It's just too easy to find something you like. What the anti-RIAA crowd needs is a single, well known, popular source where all the brainwashed zombies like myself can go and just zone out and listen to GOOD independent music. Give us the "Rick Dee's Weekly Top 40" of independent music. Give us the same catchy songs over and over and over again, 24/7. Seriously. If you can do that, I'll leave the RIAA and never look back. And so will lots of other people.
I like the idea of the "zero force" keyboard, but why did they have to make it so hideous looking? Why not just a regular old 101/104 key layout? That weird layout is a big turnoff for me. I don't want to re-learn how to type, I just want a keybard that doesn't get crud between the keys. If they want to offer that "extreme" looking thing to gamers or whatever, in addition to a keyboard with a regular layout for the rest of us, that's cool. But with that thing as their only offering, they're missing a pretty significant potential market, I'd say. Oh, yeah, I see they do also have a "mini" keyboard. Great.
Not to be mean, but the fact that someone would even bother to say something like, "Come to Canada, it's beautiful, it's great, really, etc...," pretty much says it all. No one says "Come check out America for a change! It's really nice here, honest!" That's because Americans are too busy arguing about the constant flood of illegal immigrants and silly passport laws -- like the one in this article -- that are designed to keep people out of the country.
Ok, I guess I should have put the "" tags around that post. Wow. I wasn't actually coming out in support of the DMCA... I was trying to make the point that the DMCA is idiotic, but apparently the moderators didn't get it. My apologies. I will aim lower with the political satire next time.
The sad truth is that this author may actually be in violation of the DMCA.
Who the hell does this author think he is? You cant take apart hardware! You might accidentally learn how to circumvent some form of copy protection! What -- do you actually think you own that hardware just because you paid for it? HAHAHA, not in my country, you COMMUNIST!
The lawyers are en route to your house, big boy. Let the bending and grabbing of ankles commence.
Well said! I've had a similar conversation with various people. When you think about it, this should really be obvious. Yet most fundamentalists have never even had this thought pass through their minds. "The world was created in six days, because that's what Genesis says!" That kind of attitude just provides fuel for the simple-minded mob that believes all religion is bogus.
:)
Kudos to you for sacrificing your karma to say this on Slashdot, too. You'll certainly be modded "flamebait" for suggesting that God exists. But I'm with you, and I'll sacrifice my own karma to back you up.
The bottom line, for me, is that worshiping the Bible itself is bad. It was written by men, and if you take it as the undisputable letter of the law, straight from God's mouth, you're making a mistake. Just my opinion of course. But if you can read it with some actual concious thought you just might get some good out of it. And you might realize that maybe Moses wasn't an astrophysicist, and that giving him the details of every event from the big bang through the forming of amino acids in the primordial soup probably wouldn't be very useful.
Several months ago, I posted a similar comment on an article about eMachineShop. (It's a web site where you download their CAD tool, design something, and click "buy," and your custom whatever is delivered right to your door). Yeah, I joked that maybe the AAA would be next in line after the RIAA dn the MPAA. People will soon be trading CAD designs of Ferraris on the web, instead of the latest Eminem track.
Ok, nevermind... It looks like there was a slashdot article, after all: here.
Doooood, those look awesome. 400MHz! Where's the Slashdot article on those things? :)
The "Waysmall" PCs are really interesting, but I can't find any info on their HD (or whatever other nonvolatile storage). It says they have 64MB SDRAM and a 4MB flash of some sort. Surely that's not all? What are you going to do with 4MB when the OS probably takes the majority of it?
Still, they are definitely cool. Slap a GB or two of flash or a microdrive onto one of those and you've got something.
Well, if Moore's Law/Theory holds, then we can extrapolate what will happen. Let's say you get your time machine working before the end of this year. Easy enough, right? So you zap yourself into 2039. Since you built the machine, 34 years have passed, which means that somewhere around 23 "doublings" of computer performance-per-dollar have taken place. Computers are now 2^23 = 8,388,608 times more powerful than when you left. Therefore, not only have they become self aware and erased mankind from the Earth, but they have certainly also modified their software to no longer be susceptible to the Y2038 problem. They probably just added a 33rd bit to all their variables... or something. In any case, be absolutely certain to take an EMP burst generator with you. To be on the safe side, fire it off as soon as you arrive. They'll probably be waiting for you.
Tha author just comes out of nowhere with the idea that Google would build huge farms of storage machines just to store everyone's data. Why in the hell would they want to do that? It would be expensive and slow.
Why not just keep the data on the client system, while the applications reside on Google's servers? If I want to run my word processor, I go to gword.google.com and I type away. When I'm done, I click a link that says "Save Document" and that saves a file on my local hard drive. From there I can print it, copy it, grep it, or whatever I want to do with it. So what advantage do I (or Google) gain by having the document saved on their servers? I guess I gain the ability to edit the file from anywhere, but that's hardly justification. I can achieve the exact same thing by putting it on a USB keychain drive, or e-mailing it to myself, or whatever.
Fortunately, judging by their work so far, I'd say that the Google developers are more intelligent than the author of this article.
I must be in the minority that actually like Flash. It's very effective for adding interactivity and animation to the web. Yes, it's used for lots of ads, but it's also used for lots of really cool (and even useful) sites.
But the idea that it would come bundled with other software is hideous, and the reasons should be obvious. This is the deal breaker for me and many others, I'm sure. It doesn't matter what software is bundled with Flash, the bundling itself is just wrong, in principle. And the timing of this decision couldn't possibly be worse. Google, for example, is showing more and more that rich, interactive sites can be developed without Flash. Turning Flash into mere packaging for third-party software will shift people in droves to javascript/XML alternatives (and whatever else comes along).
I remember the days when RealPlayer used to be really cool... Look at it now -- it's nothing more than packaging for advertisements. It's bad business, plain and simple.
No kidding. Instead of an "iron man" competition, they should have sort of an "American Idol" style competition, where the readers vote one comic off the island each week. Then someone talented would most likely win. Some of those comics are like an 8 year-old's scribblings.
This looks like a pretty good solution for AirPort users... but I'm looking for the whole enchilada. I want to be able to set up speakers in every room, then have a remote control that controls everything, from any room, and I want it all to be wireless (because I live in an apartment and can't run wires everywhere). And here's the real kicker: I want to be able to have anything and everything as an input -- FM/AM, CD, MP3, Shoutcast, Sirius, even the audio from the TV, or whatever. I know there are lots of products out there that let you stream your MP3s all over the house, but I want to stream everything. Is there a complete audio solution like this that doesn't cost a million dollars?
Guns-n-Roses_Welcome_to_the_Jungle.wav looks like this:Your_audio_file.wav looks like this:The important point is that your "silence" audio file is absolutely no different from any other audio file in the entire world -- it's just a bunch of numbers that represent audio data. So he did, in fact, break the law by copying silence. Therefore, one of two things must be true:
1) This person really did commit a crime, conceptually, by creating one minute and three seconds of silence, and he deserves to be punished,
or
2) The copyright system doesn't make any sense in it's current form.
But, the point is that because of the ridiculous copyright laws in this country, someone could sue. And they might even win, based on the precendents set by the RIAA's other lawsuits (e.g. suing 14 year olds and winning).
I think this is a fantastic example of just how nonsensical DRM, the RIAA, and the music industry in general are. Kudos to the guy who thought of it.