You can't take rumble 50 db down and say from that, that nobody can hear high frequency overtones 50 db down. It's not a uniform noise floor by any stretch of the imagination (besides, Fletcher-Munson will tell you that you'll have a hard time hearing 30 hz content that low even if it was just 30 db down)
Records have a very complicated, non-uniform, non-continuous noise characteristic that could have been invented just to be heard through- if you had to pick a place to put a -50 db background noise you couldn't do better than to put it in the bottom octave, and intermittent crackles are annoying but continuous uniform noise is far more opaque.
Good call on the reconstruction filter, though- you can actually exploit that to deliver way better than 90 db dynamic range on CD. Once I made a wordlength reduction that could return signals accurately at -150 db off 16 bit... as long as they were subsonic, because the noise-floor was radically tilted and burned lots of error energy way in the extreme highs. Tuned properly it could hit -150 or -160 db down around 20 hz.
I ended up going with a different approach inspired by the output behavior of Alexey Lukin's MegaBitMax dither, and doctoring it so it released error energy in tiny intermittent bursts, very like vinyl noise actually:)
"One of the reasons that LPs have a different sound is to do with the mastering process. The lower frequencies (bass) cannot be mastered at full volume and cut onto a record, because they'd cause the grooves to be too wide and literally make the needle jump out of the groove."
You're slightly confusing the RIAA equalization with elliptical filtering like on Neumann lathes- the RIAA equalization curve is more about attentuating surface noise. The elliptical filtering reduces out-of-phase bass content for the reason you mention.
"A lot of the "warmth" that supposed audiophiles go on about is probably "rumble" anyway (that is, the 50 or 60Hz drone that comes from the platter's electric motor and is passed to the needle, and other artifacts created by the rotation of the record in slightly less than perfect circles, etc)."
No no- rumble and noise isn't warmth, not even slightly. Part of the warmth of records is thanks to inconsistent noise floor amplitude- you have loads of noise at 30 hz or so, but the upper octaves are relatively very quiet, and the noise characteristic is strikingly intermittent (crackle) rather than uniform/continuous. You can hear past crackle, though it annoys- it doesn't have the capacity to mask that uniform noisefloors have, because it IS intermittent.
The other factor to warmth is shared by analog desks, and analog tape machines (combine all that with vinyl mastering and you have lots of it). It is simply nonlinearity- it turns out that purely mathematically accurate summing is sonically undesirable and sounds hard, sterile, and unconvincing. That's a common complaint with digital mixers. I suspect this is thanks to the fact that ordinary air is not perfectly linear either- it attenuates, and compresses, and it seems that people tend to enjoy hearing in their music nonlinearities similar to what would be heard through a large amount (50-100 feet) of air from a loud signal source.
So on the one hand to get 'analog magic tone' you have to really get rid of the tiny but annoying digital flaws, like quantization artifacts and the very dense and obnoxious plain-dither noise floor (which is removable through noise shaping and interaction with the D/A's reconstruction filter). Then, once you have an absolutely pure but over-sterile sound, you have to go after some of the excess energy that wouldn't be present in live music (heard at a distance) or LP. _Then_ you end up with a CD that sounds as warm and involving as the best records.
But just chasing 'accuracy' won't do it, because you'll talk yourself into giving up WAY too early, while your sound is still sound-blaster level.:)
They were useful ONCE, ya know. Back in the day, the RIAA developed uniform standards for pre-emphasis/de-emphasis curves for vinyl records. This is known as RIAA equalization, and if we didn't have it there'd be 27 different EQ curves for different records and it would have been horrible:)
What a lovely bait for Mother Of All Denial Of Service Attacks. Not using the machine as a tool to bring down other machines: I mean, using a judo approach, with the intent being to reduce the victim machine to a lump of expensive inert metal. All you have to do is convince it that something is wrong, or that a lot of things are wrong, and it will attack the user FOR you. Sweet! And apparently it will be absolutely intractable. You only have to trigger it, and the triggers are apparently real sensitive by design...
It's always interesting to see people continually say this: the perception is a huge asset for Microsoft. And of course it could not possibly be a lie, as no company would ever lie about a thing like that:D
Oh, and Enron was a really good investment. They had lots of money! Oodles of it! Just look at how big of a company they were and it becomes obvious that it couldn't possibly have been a mountain of deliberate lies and deception directed even towards the unfortunate employees of the company...
But Microsoft is not Enron. 'Cos Microsoft stands for _truth_, and their sterling reputation for honesty will show you that to them, integrity is more important than deriving an advantage from a skewed perception of their capabilities!
Sorry, can't continue, laughing too hard:) seriously, NOBODY really knows how much money and power Microsoft really has. They'll be spinning it on the one hand that they are richer than Switzerland and on the other hand that they're a poor little startup. They're so schizophrenic they don't know what reality is, at all. The only way to know for sure is to wait and see. If they implode, shocking everyone, then they were inflated and there wasn't really any money there (not enough to cover their spiraling costs and bureacracy). If they end up controlling the USA like Big Oil does, then the endless, usually sourceless rumors of them having X trillion dollars were true.
That depends. One of the weirder things to happen to me is when I gave up music. I'd been putting a huge amount of work into trying to do pop/rock music with vocals and everything, struggling with the demands of it and not getting all that far. Then, I lost patience and said 'fuck it' and quit, and started playing with the accumulated gear, making long extended experimental weirdnesses with toys like 'MidiChaos' that were guaranteed not to make a tune.
The second one I did, I've already sold two copies of the CD at ten bucks a pop. The first one was even uglier and I've sold a copy of it as well.
It's not really about whether any given music is 'good' or not- there's a listener out there for _anything_ if it's sincere and passionate rather than being a pointless hack. The problem is always hooking the listeners up with the musicians that match them.
Sometimes a music is totally non-evocative and more akin to that stunt of assembling words and putting them in a 'free book' and sneaking it onto bookshelves- so much modern art that the proper response is reading about it rather than reading it. Music of that type would be for reading about rather than listening to- or in the case of the sound collections, for having access to rather than making music out of. Strange, but kinda true...
You're looking at what might be called 'local optimizations'. There is no reason to believe that anything so toxic will prove stable and sustainable in the long run. It's a bit like die-offs in ecology- these people are going 'okay, the name of the game is to have more, so we will get MORE MORE MORE!' and they're contributing to an unhealthy situation like the dotcom boom. The crash is an intrinsic part of the situation.
It's good to watch out for your own interests, and to find ways to hang in there when the world turns toxic, but don't ever believe them when they say it's the future and that they're the model for a new way of life (Microsoft's good at believing this about itself). It's the self-delusion of toxicity.
Hell, even outside the computer industry, in society in general, he who has the most money doesn't get to pursue that infinitely. The system breaks down when things get too out of hand and negatively affect too many interested parties. Remember that in case YOU ever end up having the most money and power and want to hang on to it.
Indeed. It's not the 'viral' nature that's relevant- it's the payload. This is true for Microsoft's viral Shared Source license too.
With the GPL, the payload is, stuff has to remain accessible and available, at all costs. That's the agenda. There is no other agenda.
With Shared Source, the payload is certain legal admissions stating that you forfeit rights to sue over patent conflicts, that you do not actually have a right to any Microsoft IP you might be using, that you acknowledge these things in order to be using the source in question. The agenda seems to have a lot to do with permanently prepping developers with binding legal admissions that leave them vulnerable to legal action by virtue of their having admitted to using IP that they haven't a right to use. I'd love to know what's in store with that. However I will just have to go on not so much as looking at 'Shared Source', because I am not a total fool:)
You guys are funny- STILL conning yourself about this one. Money is cheap. Mindshare is expensive. You yourselves are actively helping Microsoft expand into all forms of media and entertainment. I'm just glad I don't care much about these things, but it still seems a shame. How many wizzy-keen XBox articles have run on Slashdot, of all places? You people... stupid, self-deluding people...
You might have to back 'fill in the blank w. name of Democrat candidate here'. In spite of their being virtually picked by GOP political maneuvering, and painted as a disaster- or possibly even _being_ a complete loser.
I voted for Nader and am still not sorry- but next time I don't see that as an option. Can't trust the system to work, so the only option is 'throw the rascals out and put the other rascals in', by a margin large enough that if they cheat, it becomes a worldwide shame and scandal and is plainly seen by all as a dynastic coup.
This, in the middle of a media environment totally poisoned and unreliable, in a political situation that could collapse into martial law at any point, for real or made-up reasons.
We can but try. It's not like nobody else in the whole world has ever been ruled by tyrants before. History establishes that tyrants overreach.
Sure. I already don't buy music. As it happens, I've been a musician all my life and in the last year I've just plain run out of desire to seriously pursue music, and essentially gave up.
I do some things still- like record extended sorta-ambient things for experiments- but even the 'serious' yet uncommercial music I did, I'm kinda giving up. Why even bother making ANY sort of music? Hell with it.
If you are familiar with the once-popular distribution service mp3.com- which once paid royalties to artists on mp3 downloads- you will know that there is already a population of basically script-kiddie types who are ALREADY EXPERT in exactly this technique.
There's also social-engineering tricks you can pull, and these too are highly developed. The context already exists! Any music service that promised to pay money as royalties for mp3 downloads of an artist has been subject to this. The smart ones stopped, because even with the best tools for analyzing logfiles, keeping ahead of cheaters is a damn money/time sink.
I think the fact that the cheaters and their finely honed techniques ALREADY EXIST is the final proof that this is indeed Worst Idea Ever.
Just give up. Artists cannot make money writing music. You can make money PERFORMING music just as you can make money hosting a square-dance, but music as information is valueless other than when used for some functional purpose. Just give up.
Attempting to divert some Music Tax to actual working artists can only be a disaster- between the script kiddies on the one side, and the RIAA labels on the other, it is flat-out guaranteed to only enrich label executives and scurvy hackers:)
Not that I have anything against scurvy hackers, I like them much better than label types. Go to it guys, rob them blind. But don't con yourselves that you're supporting Artists any more than the RIAA does.
Better to stick with the status quo even if it includes 'DRM' in major label releases- the real point is simply whether there are digital formats available that can be both played by consumers and recorded/produced by indies and unaffiliated musicians. The CD, for instance- as long as players don't actively refuse to play legacy CDs, a lot of this nonsense can be safely ignored...
Bingo. Give Casey a prize. Granted, some of the B5 ships are okay, but some of them (rather a lot of them!) would be fine as stationary positions, but you wouldn't want to move them. Unless the motive force was applied across everything equally (force field) or the ships go inertialess (E. E. 'Doc' Smith) etc.
Which would be perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned, it's SF after all. But applying force to physical structures has certain rules in this Universe, and violating those implies either that some rules (like inertia) are void, or that the spaceship is implausible crap:)
It's not like there aren't implausible crap Star Trek ships, too. Star Wars tends to be a little more plausible- apparently George Lucas is capable of saying 'No, that bit there would just break right off when it moved, do it over', something that J Michael Stryczinski apparently chooses not to do in order to be different, since he's gotta be aware of it- all the B5 ships look like freaking sea jellyfish, it must be on purpose.;)
Due to the egalitarian aspects of connectivity, and due to the low bar you gotta cross. It becomes only a matter of that connectivity- the fact that you don't have industry cred means less and less, and the stuff that's got really heavy distribution offers less and less over un-trackable, miniscule art projects everywhere.
I read and loved the Spaceship Sizes article on Slashdot, not least because I have my own SF/fantasy writing, some of which contains spaceships as well. I found myself wishing for tips on stuff like Ringworld or some of the old E. E. 'Doc' Smith spaceships, as my 'big' ship is a water tanker the size of a planetoid. At the same time, I looked at some of the designs (*cough* B5!) that just didn't make it for me- for instance, an atmospheric craft that could not possibly fly. It seemed damn pathetic, considering I have two small atmospheric craft in my Aquarius novella, and I made both of them as models in the flightsim 'X-Plane', a blade element modeler that is a real-no-fooling aero design tool. I had a amphibious sub with the capacity to fly (very fast) in air, and a biplane specifically designed to be a toy aircraft for people who were unskilled pilots. And I _built_ them to get a sense of what they were like- really, I should stick pictures of them in the relevant chapters of the book, because they are absolutely part of the backstory there. To me, this sort of thing makes the story stronger, having a setting that is realistic and not wildly contrived.
Egalatarian information means someone like me can do that sort of thing. In the 60s, 70s, even 80s, there was NO way a private individual could freely play with spaceship models in a blade element modeler to come up with a ship design that would actually work. (given that you have indestructible materials and potentially infinite thrust available...) Now, anyone can.
If mainstream art won't make the effort to be good, it will simply wind up the bottle of Budweiser at a microbrew-tasting contest: beneath contempt, not even part of people's world anymore. That's the way things are heading, so probably the thing to watch for is more connectivity- how do people find stuff they want in the absence of a controlled distribution channel?
Or to put it a more colorful way: which of the UNsigned, UNpublished science fiction and fanfiction authors have the coolest spaceships?:D
I'm going to bet on ME! even though I haven't really begun to world-build in earnest, but I would be delighted to learn that someone else out there is even better. At any rate, both of us will be better than TV schlock at the rate things are deteriorating.
Nice dystopian paranoid ranting, Billly, but what you're failing to understand is that the music business- at pretty much all levels- is shriveling up and losing the ability to command much consumer attention.
If they do not MAKE MONEY they don't have clout. And DRM doesn't actually make money for various extremely obvious reasons: such as, it's possible to get around it as easily as resampling the analog output, without even doing anything very clever, such as there's a certain amount of returns involved for DRM discs that won't play in this player or that. The RIAA may refuse to honor such returns, so THEY don't pay for it- surprise! This kills off the distribution channels the RIAA desperately needs, because the stores themselves, already struggling, must cover the returned merchandise or lose business due to annoying customers (when Kazaa is only a mouseclick away the whole time, and there's the history of recorded music to draw on).
Radio listenership is dwindling too- it no longer means what it did to a 70s or 80s kid. In general the picture is of idiots chopping at their own feet because they don't like the mud on their shoes. To put it in slashbot-libertarian terms, businesses like that CAN'T COMPETE with other forms of entertainment. There's a limit to how much that matters but the RIAA are well over that limit and picking up speed.
Commercial music may go the way of the once-popular practice of gathering people around the piano for sing-alongs. In twenty years you might be saying, "Hey, did you catch that great new tune in the Pepsi advertisement?"... and you won't have paid a cent for audio entertainment in years and years. It'll all be piggybacking on other forms of media...
What disturbs me is that, though I'd vote for her to vote against Bush, I really don't see her as being that much of an improvement. The conservatives see people like Hillary as bogeymen (okay, women) specifically because they're expected to wipe out civil liberties, and hurt our system of government by turning it into a sort of 'mama state' in which Hillary is all benevolent and decides everything- tripartite government? Congress? who needs it?
The fact that it's the Bush people who've delivered a more tangible threat in this direction doesn't mean the Democrats are necessarily to be trusted along those lines either. In fact one of the big terrors for conservatives about passing stuff like that, IS the prospect that Hillary will get in, and hey presto! Suddenly a liberal wench has the kingly powers, horrors!
Some of the smarter conservatives understand that it's the very concept of giving ANYBODY those kinds of powers which is the problem. Even if they (for some godforsaken reason) consider Bush, Ashcroft etc. to be utterly benevolent, wise, trustworthy and good, the hero-GOPers still do not get powers that overrule our system of government. They're not kings...
And as such, the very notion of locking up all the Republicans when a new regime seizes power is appalling, no matter what they've tolerated- and again some of them are very unhappy with what Bush and co. have presided over. They get upset because they are ready to deprive the GOP candidates of their vote if civil liberties and freedom keep being assaulted and government keeps getting more USSR, but where are they going to go? It would be like asking _you_ to vote Bush on the grounds that the Democrats were taking too much corporate money, which they do...
That whole site is absolutely fascinating. I'm pretty seriously socially left, but what startles me is how some (not all) of the Conservatives take the Constitution and the form and INTENT of our system of government very, very seriously. They've been reading the same history I have. They cite Madison, so do I. Amazing to find a type of common ground with these people who, if they knew me, would probably want to burn me at the stake, and yet I know with absolute certainty that if I carefully stick only to Constitutional beliefs, in all sincerity, they'll take me as one of their own- 'cos w.r.t. that type of conservatism, I _am_.
Really. I'm a Vermonter, and our Pat Leahy has been speaking up quite a bit on the subject of Iraq- he's been sending out mailings to voters establishing that he's speaking out on the subject. At the same time, I just read that he's one of the people whose name is on the bill for the original Patriot act...
To me it seems to suggest not that Hatch, Leahy etc. are correct in finding different solutions for different times, it suggests that even people with some right ideas can be tragically, dangerously wrong in other ways.
It's a great pity we cannot elect people who are _serious_ about, for instance, maintaining constitutional protections. It means that even the friendlies are vulnerable to bartering. Demand 100% of a protection be discarded, then accept 50% as a compromise. Repeat...
I only just noticed myself, 'lone wolf' means NOT affiliated with any foreign group?
So basically this means, if you are hostile to the administration for ANY reason you can be disappeared, on the basis that you're a terrorist?
I suppose things looked pretty intense in the McCarthy era too. I guess it has to swing to the point where the regular person in spite of concerted propaganda goes 'wait a minute'. That doesn't always happen- in Germany, in the 30s and 40s, the regular person thought Nazism was just fine, refreshing change from the shame of Versailles, and in Soviet Russia (insert slashdot wisecrack here) the propaganda side was pretty much totally effective. Now America is facing both of those pressures. I'd like to think Joe Average is capable of objecting to a combination of the above regimes, and the peace demonstrations are evidence of _some_ resistance, but it's hard to say whether it'll matter, at this point.
One thing to remember is, when something seems impossible but real (like the dot-com era, for instance) it can be a sign that it's not as real as you think. Unhealthy conditions propped up by faith in their continuation can really collapse quickly. I'd like to see the 'Patriot' stuff collapse quickly, but it really depends on having it be established enough to cause people problems.
Not rich white senators- it won't have to cause government people problems. If it causes enough Joe Averages problems, they'll turn, and you won't hear a word about it in the press until the bubble bursts.
The article says the student was sharing 652,000 songs, and the RIAA wants $150,000 per song.
I have had mp3s out for years now, and in a database of half a MILLION songs, I'd say that the chances are reasonable that one song or more of mine is in there.
Is this grounds to sue the RIAA for my $150,000 for the song of mine that is among the other songs they're suing over? Or do they get to directly profit (through suing) over music that is not in fact their property?
I'm reminded of the reporter who attended the World Economic Forum and then tried to send a private account to friends of hers.
It got out- very much against her will- and the world got to know a lot of very interesting information about the position and expectations of great economic powers, information that was counter to what a simplistic viewpoint would have expected.
The loss of privacy isn't as one-way as it might seem...
In order to produce coordinated action, such as to go invade someplace, you generally need a leader, just as your criticism holds.
If the problem being addressed is 'warmongering governments and untrammeled corporations are combining their forces and KILLING US left and right', with that you don't need the centralized leader. It's a more gut-level reaction that can be summed up as 'I don't wanna die', or 'I don't wanna eat poison for breakfast', or 'I don't wanna starve', or 'I don't want to get beat in the head by cops', etcetera.
Some things DON'T NEED discussion. You don't have to sit through a boring argument about why poison in your drinking water is bad, if your kid's died of it and your whole town is sick.
If you are made to sit through a boring argument about how that is GOOD and all you ever see for argument is that it is good ("Toxic Sludge Is Good For You!"), your kid will STILL be dead and your town will STILL be sick. No matter how many Queens and Kings are telling you it's for your own good, your personal reality tells you to rise up in self protection and make it stop- somehow.
That's why popular uprisings are uninformed and weak on long range planning. They are not a superpower, they are the tide. When you damage enough people, people start responding whether or not they have a plan.
With or without things like Google being reliable sources for information, whether you call it protest or call it terrorism, these uprisings will continue to happen. They are not coming from some commie leader or stalinist 'A.N.S.W.E.R.'. Those guys are just trying to ride the tiger for their own benefit, but the uprising is from natural causes and can't be made to go away.
Actually when I read what this guy is literally saying, I must agree. Democracy does look like 'boring'.
There's a problem: fascism also looks like 'boring' in that sense. When you totally submit to authority, that's what it looks like- people running dull meetings and such.
The distinction is almost entirely in what happens to the people who are NOT holding boring meetings, namely those protestors. The distinction is about what's in place to either suppress or empower those people. Maybe it's like cold war Russia in which it's all about suppressing them. Maybe it's like early America, in which protestors like that were absolutely expected, and catered to, specifically to defuse their possible desire to wage bloody revolution. That's the lesson of 'democracy': a formalized admission that you can't please everybody, that there is no stability anywhere, and therefore you've got to be able to coexist with protestors of whatever nature, because if you try to stamp them out it never works and it only helps them foment actual revolution.
And THIS is what's being complained about with the 'googlewashing'. The idea is that authority figures are colluding to stamp out, defuse, confuse, and otherwise neutralize 'protestors'. If they say 'second superpower' and it's got a ring to it, hijack the word and stop it from representing the ideas it originally was expressing. Astroturf. Make it so that no person can possibly trust their neighbor, that you can't believe anything anyone says.
"Shared Source".
"Hey, fellow barfly, did you know I can play video games on my phone?"
And now, "Check it out, fellow protesters: what we REALLY want to do is support democracy by not making any waves, or disrupting anything, because that would be bad."
This is a problem for exactly the reasons understood in Colonial days. If you hijack the movement, in order to shut off activity that supports an underlying mood ('kill the corporations! smash the warmongering state! force the machine to stop before it kills us all!'), you don't in fact address the mood itself, you are only blocking one avenue for it to vent.
This is very, very relevant in the case of anti-war protests blocking streets. There are people who are _desperate_ to stop governments from running amok. It is exactly the situation that could be fomented into revolution.
To acknowledge and empower this defuses that risk. If you brought those people _into_ the government without toning them down at all, you seriously reduce the grounds for them taking over against your will- or even blocking your streets.
If you busily co-opt all their outlets, so that suddenly their commie cell leader is saying 'Hey, guys, let's look on the good side of illegal unprovoked war for a change!' and 'Second Superpower' means 'be good and don't rock the boat- we value your opinion!', then the underlying core beliefs are frustrated to the point where only the most desperate action remains.
Reminds me of 'Fight Club' or something, in a way- when your buddies in the secret commie underground movement are trying to sell you cell phones with video games, and the vaunted Internet is returning info-warfare neuterings of concepts, and no form of media can be trusted, what is even left to do except pick some target that you're sure is bad, and destroy yourself against it, like suicide bombing, like Columbine, all that?
Right now, the reality is very dangerous. The venting NEEDS to remain possible. The freaky-radical-commie-ideas NEED to be not only expressed, but they've gotta be taken seriously, considered as part of a synthesis, not swept under the carpet.
To fail in doing this means blood and death.
You cannot suppress or redirect an idea that refuses to die.
So you'd better get used to people painting their faces and blocking streets, because if you can stop that, the next step is terrorism out of complete desperation- something that has ALREADY happened from US citizens operating from the inside, not always with a really clear agenda, but it's already started.
Either the problems get addressed in a serious way, or it'll get worse. Period.
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Records have a very complicated, non-uniform, non-continuous noise characteristic that could have been invented just to be heard through- if you had to pick a place to put a -50 db background noise you couldn't do better than to put it in the bottom octave, and intermittent crackles are annoying but continuous uniform noise is far more opaque.
Good call on the reconstruction filter, though- you can actually exploit that to deliver way better than 90 db dynamic range on CD. Once I made a wordlength reduction that could return signals accurately at -150 db off 16 bit... as long as they were subsonic, because the noise-floor was radically tilted and burned lots of error energy way in the extreme highs. Tuned properly it could hit -150 or -160 db down around 20 hz.
I ended up going with a different approach inspired by the output behavior of Alexey Lukin's MegaBitMax dither, and doctoring it so it released error energy in tiny intermittent bursts, very like vinyl noise actually :)
You're slightly confusing the RIAA equalization with elliptical filtering like on Neumann lathes- the RIAA equalization curve is more about attentuating surface noise. The elliptical filtering reduces out-of-phase bass content for the reason you mention.
"A lot of the "warmth" that supposed audiophiles go on about is probably "rumble" anyway (that is, the 50 or 60Hz drone that comes from the platter's electric motor and is passed to the needle, and other artifacts created by the rotation of the record in slightly less than perfect circles, etc)."
No no- rumble and noise isn't warmth, not even slightly. Part of the warmth of records is thanks to inconsistent noise floor amplitude- you have loads of noise at 30 hz or so, but the upper octaves are relatively very quiet, and the noise characteristic is strikingly intermittent (crackle) rather than uniform/continuous. You can hear past crackle, though it annoys- it doesn't have the capacity to mask that uniform noisefloors have, because it IS intermittent.
The other factor to warmth is shared by analog desks, and analog tape machines (combine all that with vinyl mastering and you have lots of it). It is simply nonlinearity- it turns out that purely mathematically accurate summing is sonically undesirable and sounds hard, sterile, and unconvincing. That's a common complaint with digital mixers. I suspect this is thanks to the fact that ordinary air is not perfectly linear either- it attenuates, and compresses, and it seems that people tend to enjoy hearing in their music nonlinearities similar to what would be heard through a large amount (50-100 feet) of air from a loud signal source.
So on the one hand to get 'analog magic tone' you have to really get rid of the tiny but annoying digital flaws, like quantization artifacts and the very dense and obnoxious plain-dither noise floor (which is removable through noise shaping and interaction with the D/A's reconstruction filter). Then, once you have an absolutely pure but over-sterile sound, you have to go after some of the excess energy that wouldn't be present in live music (heard at a distance) or LP. _Then_ you end up with a CD that sounds as warm and involving as the best records.
But just chasing 'accuracy' won't do it, because you'll talk yourself into giving up WAY too early, while your sound is still sound-blaster level. :)
They were useful ONCE, ya know. Back in the day, the RIAA developed uniform standards for pre-emphasis/de-emphasis curves for vinyl records. This is known as RIAA equalization, and if we didn't have it there'd be 27 different EQ curves for different records and it would have been horrible :)
What a lovely bait for Mother Of All Denial Of Service Attacks. Not using the machine as a tool to bring down other machines: I mean, using a judo approach, with the intent being to reduce the victim machine to a lump of expensive inert metal. All you have to do is convince it that something is wrong, or that a lot of things are wrong, and it will attack the user FOR you. Sweet! And apparently it will be absolutely intractable. You only have to trigger it, and the triggers are apparently real sensitive by design...
Oh, and Enron was a really good investment. They had lots of money! Oodles of it! Just look at how big of a company they were and it becomes obvious that it couldn't possibly have been a mountain of deliberate lies and deception directed even towards the unfortunate employees of the company...
But Microsoft is not Enron. 'Cos Microsoft stands for _truth_, and their sterling reputation for honesty will show you that to them, integrity is more important than deriving an advantage from a skewed perception of their capabilities!
Sorry, can't continue, laughing too hard :) seriously, NOBODY really knows how much money and power Microsoft really has. They'll be spinning it on the one hand that they are richer than Switzerland and on the other hand that they're a poor little startup. They're so schizophrenic they don't know what reality is, at all. The only way to know for sure is to wait and see. If they implode, shocking everyone, then they were inflated and there wasn't really any money there (not enough to cover their spiraling costs and bureacracy). If they end up controlling the USA like Big Oil does, then the endless, usually sourceless rumors of them having X trillion dollars were true.
I wouldn't begin to guess one way or the other.
The second one I did, I've already sold two copies of the CD at ten bucks a pop. The first one was even uglier and I've sold a copy of it as well.
It's not really about whether any given music is 'good' or not- there's a listener out there for _anything_ if it's sincere and passionate rather than being a pointless hack. The problem is always hooking the listeners up with the musicians that match them.
Sometimes a music is totally non-evocative and more akin to that stunt of assembling words and putting them in a 'free book' and sneaking it onto bookshelves- so much modern art that the proper response is reading about it rather than reading it. Music of that type would be for reading about rather than listening to- or in the case of the sound collections, for having access to rather than making music out of. Strange, but kinda true...
You're looking at what might be called 'local optimizations'. There is no reason to believe that anything so toxic will prove stable and sustainable in the long run. It's a bit like die-offs in ecology- these people are going 'okay, the name of the game is to have more, so we will get MORE MORE MORE!' and they're contributing to an unhealthy situation like the dotcom boom. The crash is an intrinsic part of the situation.
It's good to watch out for your own interests, and to find ways to hang in there when the world turns toxic, but don't ever believe them when they say it's the future and that they're the model for a new way of life (Microsoft's good at believing this about itself). It's the self-delusion of toxicity.
Hell, even outside the computer industry, in society in general, he who has the most money doesn't get to pursue that infinitely. The system breaks down when things get too out of hand and negatively affect too many interested parties. Remember that in case YOU ever end up having the most money and power and want to hang on to it.
With the GPL, the payload is, stuff has to remain accessible and available, at all costs. That's the agenda. There is no other agenda.
With Shared Source, the payload is certain legal admissions stating that you forfeit rights to sue over patent conflicts, that you do not actually have a right to any Microsoft IP you might be using, that you acknowledge these things in order to be using the source in question. The agenda seems to have a lot to do with permanently prepping developers with binding legal admissions that leave them vulnerable to legal action by virtue of their having admitted to using IP that they haven't a right to use. I'd love to know what's in store with that. However I will just have to go on not so much as looking at 'Shared Source', because I am not a total fool :)
You guys are funny- STILL conning yourself about this one. Money is cheap. Mindshare is expensive. You yourselves are actively helping Microsoft expand into all forms of media and entertainment. I'm just glad I don't care much about these things, but it still seems a shame. How many wizzy-keen XBox articles have run on Slashdot, of all places? You people... stupid, self-deluding people...
I voted for Nader and am still not sorry- but next time I don't see that as an option. Can't trust the system to work, so the only option is 'throw the rascals out and put the other rascals in', by a margin large enough that if they cheat, it becomes a worldwide shame and scandal and is plainly seen by all as a dynastic coup.
This, in the middle of a media environment totally poisoned and unreliable, in a political situation that could collapse into martial law at any point, for real or made-up reasons.
We can but try. It's not like nobody else in the whole world has ever been ruled by tyrants before. History establishes that tyrants overreach.
The application of this to genetic engineering can be best left to the imagination.
Ooo. ...scuse me, gotta go take care of something very important for a minute ;)
I do some things still- like record extended sorta-ambient things for experiments- but even the 'serious' yet uncommercial music I did, I'm kinda giving up. Why even bother making ANY sort of music? Hell with it.
There's also social-engineering tricks you can pull, and these too are highly developed. The context already exists! Any music service that promised to pay money as royalties for mp3 downloads of an artist has been subject to this. The smart ones stopped, because even with the best tools for analyzing logfiles, keeping ahead of cheaters is a damn money/time sink.
I think the fact that the cheaters and their finely honed techniques ALREADY EXIST is the final proof that this is indeed Worst Idea Ever.
Just give up. Artists cannot make money writing music. You can make money PERFORMING music just as you can make money hosting a square-dance, but music as information is valueless other than when used for some functional purpose. Just give up.
Attempting to divert some Music Tax to actual working artists can only be a disaster- between the script kiddies on the one side, and the RIAA labels on the other, it is flat-out guaranteed to only enrich label executives and scurvy hackers :)
Not that I have anything against scurvy hackers, I like them much better than label types. Go to it guys, rob them blind. But don't con yourselves that you're supporting Artists any more than the RIAA does.
Better to stick with the status quo even if it includes 'DRM' in major label releases- the real point is simply whether there are digital formats available that can be both played by consumers and recorded/produced by indies and unaffiliated musicians. The CD, for instance- as long as players don't actively refuse to play legacy CDs, a lot of this nonsense can be safely ignored...
Which would be perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned, it's SF after all. But applying force to physical structures has certain rules in this Universe, and violating those implies either that some rules (like inertia) are void, or that the spaceship is implausible crap :)
It's not like there aren't implausible crap Star Trek ships, too. Star Wars tends to be a little more plausible- apparently George Lucas is capable of saying 'No, that bit there would just break right off when it moved, do it over', something that J Michael Stryczinski apparently chooses not to do in order to be different, since he's gotta be aware of it- all the B5 ships look like freaking sea jellyfish, it must be on purpose. ;)
I read and loved the Spaceship Sizes article on Slashdot, not least because I have my own SF/fantasy writing, some of which contains spaceships as well. I found myself wishing for tips on stuff like Ringworld or some of the old E. E. 'Doc' Smith spaceships, as my 'big' ship is a water tanker the size of a planetoid. At the same time, I looked at some of the designs (*cough* B5!) that just didn't make it for me- for instance, an atmospheric craft that could not possibly fly. It seemed damn pathetic, considering I have two small atmospheric craft in my Aquarius novella, and I made both of them as models in the flightsim 'X-Plane', a blade element modeler that is a real-no-fooling aero design tool. I had a amphibious sub with the capacity to fly (very fast) in air, and a biplane specifically designed to be a toy aircraft for people who were unskilled pilots. And I _built_ them to get a sense of what they were like- really, I should stick pictures of them in the relevant chapters of the book, because they are absolutely part of the backstory there. To me, this sort of thing makes the story stronger, having a setting that is realistic and not wildly contrived.
Egalatarian information means someone like me can do that sort of thing. In the 60s, 70s, even 80s, there was NO way a private individual could freely play with spaceship models in a blade element modeler to come up with a ship design that would actually work. (given that you have indestructible materials and potentially infinite thrust available...) Now, anyone can.
If mainstream art won't make the effort to be good, it will simply wind up the bottle of Budweiser at a microbrew-tasting contest: beneath contempt, not even part of people's world anymore. That's the way things are heading, so probably the thing to watch for is more connectivity- how do people find stuff they want in the absence of a controlled distribution channel?
Or to put it a more colorful way: which of the UNsigned, UNpublished science fiction and fanfiction authors have the coolest spaceships? :D
I'm going to bet on ME! even though I haven't really begun to world-build in earnest, but I would be delighted to learn that someone else out there is even better. At any rate, both of us will be better than TV schlock at the rate things are deteriorating.
If they do not MAKE MONEY they don't have clout. And DRM doesn't actually make money for various extremely obvious reasons: such as, it's possible to get around it as easily as resampling the analog output, without even doing anything very clever, such as there's a certain amount of returns involved for DRM discs that won't play in this player or that. The RIAA may refuse to honor such returns, so THEY don't pay for it- surprise! This kills off the distribution channels the RIAA desperately needs, because the stores themselves, already struggling, must cover the returned merchandise or lose business due to annoying customers (when Kazaa is only a mouseclick away the whole time, and there's the history of recorded music to draw on).
Radio listenership is dwindling too- it no longer means what it did to a 70s or 80s kid. In general the picture is of idiots chopping at their own feet because they don't like the mud on their shoes. To put it in slashbot-libertarian terms, businesses like that CAN'T COMPETE with other forms of entertainment. There's a limit to how much that matters but the RIAA are well over that limit and picking up speed.
Commercial music may go the way of the once-popular practice of gathering people around the piano for sing-alongs. In twenty years you might be saying, "Hey, did you catch that great new tune in the Pepsi advertisement?"... and you won't have paid a cent for audio entertainment in years and years. It'll all be piggybacking on other forms of media...
Seriously, those are the most structurally unsound things I ever saw. In space, even though there is no weight there is still mass, Einstein! ;)
The fact that it's the Bush people who've delivered a more tangible threat in this direction doesn't mean the Democrats are necessarily to be trusted along those lines either. In fact one of the big terrors for conservatives about passing stuff like that, IS the prospect that Hillary will get in, and hey presto! Suddenly a liberal wench has the kingly powers, horrors!
Some of the smarter conservatives understand that it's the very concept of giving ANYBODY those kinds of powers which is the problem. Even if they (for some godforsaken reason) consider Bush, Ashcroft etc. to be utterly benevolent, wise, trustworthy and good, the hero-GOPers still do not get powers that overrule our system of government. They're not kings...
And as such, the very notion of locking up all the Republicans when a new regime seizes power is appalling, no matter what they've tolerated- and again some of them are very unhappy with what Bush and co. have presided over. They get upset because they are ready to deprive the GOP candidates of their vote if civil liberties and freedom keep being assaulted and government keeps getting more USSR, but where are they going to go? It would be like asking _you_ to vote Bush on the grounds that the Democrats were taking too much corporate money, which they do...
Pretty messed up, all of it...
That whole site is absolutely fascinating. I'm pretty seriously socially left, but what startles me is how some (not all) of the Conservatives take the Constitution and the form and INTENT of our system of government very, very seriously. They've been reading the same history I have. They cite Madison, so do I. Amazing to find a type of common ground with these people who, if they knew me, would probably want to burn me at the stake, and yet I know with absolute certainty that if I carefully stick only to Constitutional beliefs, in all sincerity, they'll take me as one of their own- 'cos w.r.t. that type of conservatism, I _am_.
To me it seems to suggest not that Hatch, Leahy etc. are correct in finding different solutions for different times, it suggests that even people with some right ideas can be tragically, dangerously wrong in other ways.
It's a great pity we cannot elect people who are _serious_ about, for instance, maintaining constitutional protections. It means that even the friendlies are vulnerable to bartering. Demand 100% of a protection be discarded, then accept 50% as a compromise. Repeat...
So basically this means, if you are hostile to the administration for ANY reason you can be disappeared, on the basis that you're a terrorist?
I suppose things looked pretty intense in the McCarthy era too. I guess it has to swing to the point where the regular person in spite of concerted propaganda goes 'wait a minute'. That doesn't always happen- in Germany, in the 30s and 40s, the regular person thought Nazism was just fine, refreshing change from the shame of Versailles, and in Soviet Russia (insert slashdot wisecrack here) the propaganda side was pretty much totally effective. Now America is facing both of those pressures. I'd like to think Joe Average is capable of objecting to a combination of the above regimes, and the peace demonstrations are evidence of _some_ resistance, but it's hard to say whether it'll matter, at this point.
One thing to remember is, when something seems impossible but real (like the dot-com era, for instance) it can be a sign that it's not as real as you think. Unhealthy conditions propped up by faith in their continuation can really collapse quickly. I'd like to see the 'Patriot' stuff collapse quickly, but it really depends on having it be established enough to cause people problems.
Not rich white senators- it won't have to cause government people problems. If it causes enough Joe Averages problems, they'll turn, and you won't hear a word about it in the press until the bubble bursts.
I have had mp3s out for years now, and in a database of half a MILLION songs, I'd say that the chances are reasonable that one song or more of mine is in there.
Is this grounds to sue the RIAA for my $150,000 for the song of mine that is among the other songs they're suing over? Or do they get to directly profit (through suing) over music that is not in fact their property?
It got out- very much against her will- and the world got to know a lot of very interesting information about the position and expectations of great economic powers, information that was counter to what a simplistic viewpoint would have expected.
The loss of privacy isn't as one-way as it might seem...
In order to produce coordinated action, such as to go invade someplace, you generally need a leader, just as your criticism holds.
If the problem being addressed is 'warmongering governments and untrammeled corporations are combining their forces and KILLING US left and right', with that you don't need the centralized leader. It's a more gut-level reaction that can be summed up as 'I don't wanna die', or 'I don't wanna eat poison for breakfast', or 'I don't wanna starve', or 'I don't want to get beat in the head by cops', etcetera.
Some things DON'T NEED discussion. You don't have to sit through a boring argument about why poison in your drinking water is bad, if your kid's died of it and your whole town is sick.
If you are made to sit through a boring argument about how that is GOOD and all you ever see for argument is that it is good ("Toxic Sludge Is Good For You!"), your kid will STILL be dead and your town will STILL be sick. No matter how many Queens and Kings are telling you it's for your own good, your personal reality tells you to rise up in self protection and make it stop- somehow.
That's why popular uprisings are uninformed and weak on long range planning. They are not a superpower, they are the tide. When you damage enough people, people start responding whether or not they have a plan.
With or without things like Google being reliable sources for information, whether you call it protest or call it terrorism, these uprisings will continue to happen. They are not coming from some commie leader or stalinist 'A.N.S.W.E.R.'. Those guys are just trying to ride the tiger for their own benefit, but the uprising is from natural causes and can't be made to go away.
There's a problem: fascism also looks like 'boring' in that sense. When you totally submit to authority, that's what it looks like- people running dull meetings and such.
The distinction is almost entirely in what happens to the people who are NOT holding boring meetings, namely those protestors. The distinction is about what's in place to either suppress or empower those people. Maybe it's like cold war Russia in which it's all about suppressing them. Maybe it's like early America, in which protestors like that were absolutely expected, and catered to, specifically to defuse their possible desire to wage bloody revolution. That's the lesson of 'democracy': a formalized admission that you can't please everybody, that there is no stability anywhere, and therefore you've got to be able to coexist with protestors of whatever nature, because if you try to stamp them out it never works and it only helps them foment actual revolution.
And THIS is what's being complained about with the 'googlewashing'. The idea is that authority figures are colluding to stamp out, defuse, confuse, and otherwise neutralize 'protestors'. If they say 'second superpower' and it's got a ring to it, hijack the word and stop it from representing the ideas it originally was expressing. Astroturf. Make it so that no person can possibly trust their neighbor, that you can't believe anything anyone says.
"Shared Source".
"Hey, fellow barfly, did you know I can play video games on my phone?"
And now, "Check it out, fellow protesters: what we REALLY want to do is support democracy by not making any waves, or disrupting anything, because that would be bad."
This is a problem for exactly the reasons understood in Colonial days. If you hijack the movement, in order to shut off activity that supports an underlying mood ('kill the corporations! smash the warmongering state! force the machine to stop before it kills us all!'), you don't in fact address the mood itself, you are only blocking one avenue for it to vent.
This is very, very relevant in the case of anti-war protests blocking streets. There are people who are _desperate_ to stop governments from running amok. It is exactly the situation that could be fomented into revolution.
To acknowledge and empower this defuses that risk. If you brought those people _into_ the government without toning them down at all, you seriously reduce the grounds for them taking over against your will- or even blocking your streets.
If you busily co-opt all their outlets, so that suddenly their commie cell leader is saying 'Hey, guys, let's look on the good side of illegal unprovoked war for a change!' and 'Second Superpower' means 'be good and don't rock the boat- we value your opinion!', then the underlying core beliefs are frustrated to the point where only the most desperate action remains.
Reminds me of 'Fight Club' or something, in a way- when your buddies in the secret commie underground movement are trying to sell you cell phones with video games, and the vaunted Internet is returning info-warfare neuterings of concepts, and no form of media can be trusted, what is even left to do except pick some target that you're sure is bad, and destroy yourself against it, like suicide bombing, like Columbine, all that?
Right now, the reality is very dangerous. The venting NEEDS to remain possible. The freaky-radical-commie-ideas NEED to be not only expressed, but they've gotta be taken seriously, considered as part of a synthesis, not swept under the carpet.
To fail in doing this means blood and death.
You cannot suppress or redirect an idea that refuses to die.
So you'd better get used to people painting their faces and blocking streets, because if you can stop that, the next step is terrorism out of complete desperation- something that has ALREADY happened from US citizens operating from the inside, not always with a really clear agenda, but it's already started.
Either the problems get addressed in a serious way, or it'll get worse. Period.