If you cannot understand the language of scientific inquiry and discovery, or if your world consists entirely of exchange value and nothing else, naturally you wouldn't see any point to the sharing of ideas.
I could go, "But doing it would avoid stultifying science, and everybody progresses more rapidly", but if your ONLY yardstick is how much you're stomping your immediate competitor, why would you care?
Welcome to the new Dark Ages. Thanks a lot for your contribution.
The things you outline are hypothetical. It's like Wired outlining 'the Long Boom' in great detail. Funny how it never happened...
Palladium is in such a nebulous, unimplemented state that nobody's even been putting the words 'boycott Palladium' together yet. Hardly a surprise- where DO you go to buy a Palladium anyway? How do you boycott something you can't buy yet?
What you mean is, "Microsoft has already got a long-term plan". Big woop- that's their job, and that's served them well in the past. Now it's time to make their lives hell if they mean to implement this one. They'll wind up with 1/3 of their desired goals and like it. It's a time-honored technique, of aiming way high and then 'reluctantly settling' for what you would've been happy with anyway...
Let's assume 'Shared Source' and GPL code- I can't speak for all sorts, those are two sorts which I've studied the licenses enough to know what it would mean.
MS yelling 'copyright infringement' can be translated to mean 'shut this down!' and immediately raises issues of what the developer's rights and requirements are, on both sides.
On the one side, the developer under Shared Source does not have any right to any specific ideas- hence the yelling of 'infringement', MS could pick some patent or other and claim it's infringed. At that point, the developer is 'out of the pool': it's been proven that he or she is privy to Microsoft secrets but has no right to them, and the same tactic can work again and again. Unlike a normal person that developer's made admissions in the licensing agreement that they HAVE been aware of such secrets. For most people, it would be necessary to show that they were privy to the information.
On the GPL side it's simpler: anyone in that kind of a legal bind cannot both satisfy the other license and the GPL. If they can't fully satisfy the constraints of the other agreements and the GPL, they were never really legally releasing code under the GPL. It may look like GPLed code, and have the same licenses written on it, but if the guy can't legally release under the GPL and is releasing anyway, he's ILLEGALLY releasing under the GPL, with no rights to do so. Any code released under those conditions needs to be discarded- and the body of Free Software developers can't be held responsible for the acts of a criminal, beyond making voluntary efforts to discard the tainted code. This bears repeating- rather than instantly 'taint' the whole Free world, legally the impact is more likely to be like an oil spill- to be cleaned up as much as practical. Otherwise it's like 'the oil tanker crashed and oil spilled! Quick! Get rid of the tainted Atlantic Ocean!'
I am not a lawyer. I do think my points are valid, though. When legalisms are crazy but still applicable, that's not so much a sign that nonlawyers should defer to lawyers- it's more a sign saying that legalism is on thin ice. Any speculation that accidental mixture of SS and GPL (hmmmm, SS...) would cause instant catastrophic failure of the Free world, is damned thin ice. Law doesn't work that way- and even if it reduced to pedantic details of the SS license, the same pedantic reading of the GPL would show that the infringing developer was automatically disqualified from releasing under the GPL. Doesn't matter if they did release anyway- that would be the oil spill to be cleaned up, and you cannot hold an entire community responsible for the acts of one person who was in fact violating the primary rules of the community in their actions.
If I may- specifically, the mechanism to watch out for is their 'Shared Source License'. The above sounds paranoid, but it's really not, it's just not specific enough to ring true- fact is, you CAN'T look at Microsoft code normally, so the fact that you can look at 'software code' normally without the world ending is kinda moot.
Their licensing for that stuff is viral, and the payload is several admissions with powerful legal implications- that you cannot use patents against Microsoft, and more dangerously, the admission that you have seen Microsoft code and ideas (some of which may be patented) and concede first that you've seen it and remembered it, and second that you don't really have any right to it. These admissions make any developer privy to Shared Source code guilty unless proved innocent of copyright infringement and/or patent infringement, and are a powerful weapon for use by the MS legal team.
Homer's gone off halfcocked (the lawyers will NOT be going 'look he stole our ifs and printfs') but the underlying point is as real as cancer and shouldn't be discounted. The lawyers will be going 'did you or did you not agree to this shared source license agreement? Here are records of you having worked with this code, your only legal avenue of doing so having been the Shared Source licensing agreement.' Kaching. End of game- and that developer remains tainted FOR LIFE!
Yes, it's that serious- as long as there are lawyers, and that agreement is legally sound. And note who is responsible for asserting that it is...
When running Linux plus hiring Norbert your uncle Fred's kid as a Personal Sysadmin is cheaper and easier than keeping up with what Microsoft needs you to do to remain a customer, then Microsoft will have reason to worry.
Think a level deeper. Of the people you mentioned, who among them would EVER have a reason to 'upgrade', or would even notice if they 'upgraded' in name only and secretly kept running what they knew, for years and years?
That's the punch-line: Microsoft needs people to grow and become clever and program-savvy and use lots of new features, in order to sell them new software very often. The very argument you use to put down Linux is also the reason Microsoft's position is tenuous... almost nobody NEEDS to continually purchase new Microsoft software. They do so because they're begged to. It's like a favor. An expensive favor...
Don't say those two words ("GPL Patent") together until it's literally true that everything is by default patented (just as everything is by default copyright to an author) and it is otherwise impossible to produce an idea and make use of it publically.:(
That day may be coming rapidly, but so far it is STILL possible to produce patentable ideas and put them out unfettered into the world- like academics used to do before academia became a profit center.
NOT YET! Slow down! Don't be talking 'GPL Patent' until it's really unavoidable! It may have escaped your attention but free distribution of ideas IS still possible, even though patents do exist.
This may be merely temporary, depending on just how much patent examiners expect the courts to do the work of checking to see if something's got prior art. If it's up to the courts, then everything will be patented, by companies who can afford to threaten legal battles against the true, ill-funded inventors- and that'll be real 'piracy', as in 'arrrr! give me that, no you can't have it!'
The GPL itself would not exist or have to exist were it not for copyright that was automatic. The equivalent in the patent sphere would be a legal admission that no possible idea can exist in the wild free for use- that everything was someone's property. And that's not happened yet!
"these artists freely share their music with the world."
They sure do- mp3.com was what Michael Robertson did before he started messing with Linux through 'Lindows' and charging people for access to Debian mirrors and attempting to place restrictions like "please do not make copies of this software for your friends".
mp3.com is now owned by Vivendi International- it's part of the majors. It mostly touts major label promos now- signing up with mp3.com means you permanently give up certain rights to your material- and if they don't want to pay you, they won't, they'll make up and excuse and kick you off rather than pay you.
"Out of this arbitrary arrangement, all stemming from the military client's refusal to have the engines in the body, the designers, groping for a formula that would reconcile structural integrity with aerodynamic balance, made their own luck. The first step was unorthodox. Instead of proposing a rigid wing, the structures men outlined a wing that would be unusually flexible, designed to bend with the aerodynamic stresses as it carried the loads of the underslung engines. This was called an 'aeroelastic' wing, an image that was, if anything, an understatement." -history of the design of the B-47 as reported in Clive Irving's "Wide-Body: The Making Of The Boeing 747
Sorry- I've lost patience with slashdotter smackdowns that have no justification. Dunno who you are, or whether you were having a bad day or what- points for not being an anonymous coward, anyway- but aeroelasticity dates back to the first jet bomber, the B-47, pattern for the later Boeing jet airliners, and it is precisely the word they used. No, I didn't design it: yes, I figured out that everything bends under stress and has elasticity many years ago, thank you.
Geez. Must be something in the water making Slashdotters cranky. Even I'm kinda cranky:D
Aeroelastic is old. That's the way 747 wings were built, and 707s, the entire pedigree of Boeing swept-wing jets have aeroelastic wings. They use the podded engines to direct the bends of the wing so that they are bending in useful ways. Non-useful ways would include flutter and pitching up in a stall.
What's being talked about here is DIRECTED aeroelastic wings, even more elastic than the Boeing jets. Sounds like a neat idea:) sure as hell would result in control surface effectiveness! Not only no control surface gaps, but the whole damn wing's a control surface. In addition, this could also trim the wings to act as flaps, changing wing incidence on the fly.
Yes, you should build speakers. Building speakers is a terrific geek pastime.
No, this guy's speakers aren't that great.
There are some good points, however. He's doing nothing of note constructionwise, but the larger choice of the sonotube has significant advantages and disadvantages. Big plus: tube shape means walls CANNOT flex from pressure. That allows for potentially thunderous reproduction of the sound coming out, without overhang or weakening of the fundamental. Big minus: the sound coming out is strongly colored by the inside of the enclosure being the second worst possible shape in the universe- worst is a sphere. Testing has shown that these shapes are the best possible for the outside of an enclosure, but the worst for the inside.
What I've found works best for really serious bass is multiple drivers of gradiated sizes. My mains are running 6.5/8/10/12 drivers series-parallel like a Marshall cab- wattage is comparable to four of the weakest speaker (6.5) series-parallel, because that's the one that'd blow first. I have a narrow but absurdly deep cabinet, internal walls, bottom two sections ported and the top two open-backed. I had acoustic foam in there but found that it sounded better in the mids to leave it totally open, since all the resonance and reverberation goes straight out the back. The bottom, with the 10 and 12, has two good-sized ports, but since the box is so big (and it's running acoustic suspension drivers, too) the port only extends the lows further- it is not tuned high enough to make 'one note bass', it's reinforcing the really extreme lows.
If you want a REAL geek audio project, make some supertweeters like I did. Small piezo drivers (I'm using some fairly rigid and tough-to-solder-to ones I got in bulk), mount them on something solid while leaving the middle free to flex (rigid mounting like superglue, not a soft gasket), and then take some envelopes with that clear cellophane stuff that crackles easily if you rumple it. Cut out rectangular pieces big enough that you can make an 'M'- you're going to be making a degradation of the Lineaum cylindrical driver. That requires a piece to translate piezo flex into true linear motion- as shown in the *spit* patent- this skips the bridge piece and applies flexing-disc vibration directly to the leaves of the driver. In doing so it fails to be a proper line source- but the weight of the moving mass is that much less!
Take two 'leaves' and superglue them together at the base. You can trim them a bit so there's a slight ) shape to the part that'll be glued to the piezo. Take a bit of acoustic foam, superglue the outside of the sandwich of cellophane on one side to it, attach it to the speaker to the side of the piezo (which you should have wired up already). Then do the same to the other side- you want a 'm', seen from the top, with the middle bit resting directly on the piezo. The 'm' shouldn't be too tall, but it does have to form full half-cylinders- it shouldn't be flat. Finally, if it's all good, put a dot of superglue on the middle of the piezo, and allow the center of the 'm' to be attached permanently.
How it works: pressure from the piezo displaces the cellophane. Since it's two loose semicylinders, it flexes, choosing to compress together at first rather than shift the whole structure outwards. Surprise! The semicylinders form an exponential horn- and you've just compressed the throat, forcing air out! In addition, the wave will travel outward from the center, until it dissipates by air resistance and eventually the acoustic foam mounting at the far end. This tweeter goes up forever, way beyond CD capabilities, very cleanly, and it also has phenomenal dispersion characteristics- very wide soundfield, virtually no beaming. The difference is not subtle.
In a perfect world, lots of people could work with this technique and develop it as free software is developed. I've seen the patents on the _refined_ version of this- involving a bridge piece between the (not truly linear) driver and the base of the cylinders- and until the patents expire, this is officially proprietary.
I am sure that will dissuade MANY slashdotters from getting cellophane, piezos and superglue, and building their own supertweeters. Don't you people know developing on ideas someone else had is wrong? Remember, whoever-it-was who said, "If I have failed to see farther, it is because I wasn't allowed to stand on anybody's shoulders, so there";)
Why have I taken so much effort to communicate this technique? Because I'm a speaker designer myself. I have numerous ideas that are in fact mine, and hybrids of those with things like the Linaeum cylindrical driver, some of which are just terrific. And I'm very annoyed by a reality in which I cannot function as a simple artisan and idea-haver, without patent-wrestling with corporations- and in which I can't even go ahead with my own stuff, as corporations will take anything that's really good, and patent it since I won't, possibly even stopping me from using something I've invented. It makes you want to hide and never build anything.
There's nothing to do but go ahead anyway, but understand that my 'outing' of a homebrew way to do a degraded form of the Lineaum piezo driver patent is a combination of 'power to the people' and simple bitterness. What would have happened if the person to make the first cone driver had locked it up with patents, filed extensions, retained control of it to the present day? There'd be virtually no speakers, is what.
I feel the ideas that MOST deserve patent protection are the ones that most harm the scientific environment through their being guarded by lawyers. 'swinging sideways on a swing' patents are harmless. The ones that are REALLY GOOD are the ones that NEED to disseminate out into society.
....which only goes to show that I need to be using more of my paid-for web space to publicize the work that _I_ do, with no hope of recompense, ever, just to remain true to the principles I've set out. Other people do that- it's not unique to do so. It's merely taking sides, knowingly or unknowingly.
"Anyone who tells you not to read atlas shrugged is, by definition, someone who wants to eliminate human rights."
*ROFL*
You see, this is the problem with you and your Rand there. Do you not understand that most people, seeing the words 'human rights', will think of SOCIETAL benefit rather than some hypothetical 'I get to do whatever I want' system in which 'human rights' means 'kill the unfit'?
Don't read Atlas Shrugged because it sucks and is endless boring ranting- the actual ideas can be found more cheaply in the posts of many Slashdot posters, saving you the trouble of acquiring the actual book.
But don't believe Ayn Rand because the woman was so scarred by Stalinism that she went to the opposite extreme, totally rejecting ALL societal benefit and trying to construct a society of ideally rational superhumans, of which she was the infallible leader (I do not exaggerate- she did consider herself infallible.)
In your evaluation of Ayn Rand and whether to bother with her, consider that she would have not only agreed with the statement "Anyone who tells you not to read atlas shrugged is, by definition, someone who wants to eliminate human rights"... she also would have told you that such a person was so fundamentally dishonest and committed to deception that they could not be listened to on ANY SUBJECT. In essence, she'd tell you that such a person could not hold such an opinion without secretly believing in Atlas Shrugged but maliciously professing the opposite for some evil purpose: to her, her ideas were so unchallengable that one COULD NOT disagree without being insane or intentionally falsifying.
Those of us who consider Ayn Rand was a dangerous loony can make a pretty good case for it, really. And no, that doesn't mean that all her ideas are invalid- but she was crippled by demonizing the very idea of collective society itself.
When our society (here in the US) resembles Stalinist USSR, then you can demonize collective society. Oddly, though, this movement in the direction of Cold War Russia is being spearheaded by the selfish, and resisted by the more socially aware...
That's why something like legislation to prevent abusive contracts is valid. You simply DO NOT expect dumb musician kids to be able to out-think treacherous old music industry lawyers- or expect them to be able to find a qualified lawyer who is not sitting on BOTH SIDES of the table. You do know that in entertainment law there's a risk that the lawyer you 'intelligently' hire can be, undisclosed, working for the record company too- and in a crunch can end up taking their side not yours? You can't expect musician kids to deal with a reality like that.
Your problem is that you assume that everybody, across the board, AUTOMATICALLY has and uses Godlike powers of information and rationality. There's no place for the fallible in your system- if someone makes a choice that harms them, it's entirely on them- they have absolutely no slack to have an off day or bad information or over-trustingness. The instant somebody lies, in your system everyone is responsible for detecting the lie on their own or getting hurt by it.
I don't agree with that.
You have to protect some of the people who will be doing some dumb things some of the time. Yeah, there's a limit, but you're saying it should never be done at all. I disagree. Strongly. And if you feel like you can be 100% rational all the time, you must be a hell of an annoying dude;)
Or are you part of the "you are 0wn3d, suck it up and deal until you're dead" crowd?
I'm sorry, but regrettably some of us are less cowardly than that- and you can't possibly change anything by refusing to try. Call it wasted effort if you want- thankfully it's not up to you.
I live in a state with a Socialist representative- Vermont, with our Bernie Sanders, whom we appreciate. The guy writes up anticorporatist essays to put on his House web site. I vote Progressive because someone had the balls to come to my door and talk to me, with flyers and stuff for the basic tenets of the Progressives (including daring stuff such as maximum wage), otherwise I might still be more of an apolitical doormat.
Be a doormat if you want, but do you really expect other people NOT to organize? Look at what's happening!
Re:What it means to have the highest perspective
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Politicizing Science
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Damn straight. The administration WANTS not to know. This is gross irresponsibility far beyond simply holding views some of us might not like. Not only that, they're making a concerted effort to stack things so that nobody else is given straight truth either. This behavior is a lot worse than its own consequences, in some ways- it indicates serious incompetence to lead. You have to be able to at least SEE bad news even if you're gonna ignore it!
These guys make the Nixon administration look good. At least THEY were focused almost entirely on Nixon's re-election at all costs! This time the administration assumes it's gonna be a dynasty and has gone straight on to trying to roll back the clock to a hybrid of the Middle and Industrial ages on ideological grounds- and certain ideas are not allowed to be expressed.
It's easy to see that this is an assault on the ideas being shut out- but what a lot of people are missing is that it is also crippling to the administration itself, because if any of those ideas are in fact a serious danger being covered up, the situation will turn a danger into a huge disaster through refusal to acknowledge the problem.
We have got to get rid of this administration. I hope something like impeachment can be carried out. Whatever its political and ideological views, the one thing an administration cannot do is take a 'I'm not listening, I'm not listening!' approach. Mockery and contempt is not enough. This is dangerous. And they're doing it with regard to EVERYTHING.
Since when is 'tell me only exactly what I want to hear' responsible? It is gross incompetence. The people doing this should be fired- not for some moral sin, but for gross irresponsibility and damaging the flow of information to the Chief Executive. They have a RESPONSIBILITY to be passing useful data up the chain of command. I don't care if the guy only wants to hear good news- that only means HE is incompetent too and doesn't change a thing. They are obligated to not do this!
A friend of mine in Brattleboro VT was working within the industry in the 80s, and saw specific examples of this sort of thing- you're not just being paranoid.
Specifically, at the time there was a new genre turning up in the underground- 'noise', an offshoot of Industrial. (This story came up when my friend learned I'd done a 'noise' album)
The labels (at least the one my friend was in contact with) saw this happening and heard the initial buzz. Not wanting to be caught off-guard, they sent out A&R reps and promptly signed up ALL the noise bands- to $5000 contracts with an option to release an album.
That option was not the band's. It was the record company's. They'd effectively taken that entire scene off the market- the contracts didn't require that the label release or do ANYTHING. It was just a $5000 advance, nothing further ever had to be done- and those bands were off the market, contractually bound to not sign with anyone else, effectively neutralized. No records were ever released as 'Noise' is not the poppiest of genres:)
Maybe you're not paranoid enough. You do understand that labels can and will 'sign' bands like that to a contract that requires nothing on behalf of the label? $5000 to be taken out of the game for X many years so no other label can have you.
The real answer to that is, don't sign anything, even a post-it note. Labels customarily begin things by a informal-looking jotted-down note, preferably on the back of an envelope or something, saying 'we agree to come to an agreement with the label', and have the band sign that in exchange for immediate money. It's legally binding and at that point the band MUST sign, and the label hasn't even specified any terms yet.
Just treat them like used-car salesmen or spammers or 'wealthy Nigerian investors seeking assistance with the sum of $49,000,000 to be transferred to a US bank'. There's really no such word as paranoia when dealing with these guys.
I think it would be a good idea to watch out for attempts by Microsoft to lobby on behalf of making Linux illegal (or perhaps forbidden for government work?)... on grounds of it being a security risk.
Yeah, that would be insane- but the question to ask is, do they have the lobbying and PR muscle to pull it off? Microsoft's style of winning is not wholly restricted to utter Forrest Gump truthfulness. I see this as a sort of Xmas present for them, and I see them trying to figure out just this: whether they can launch a lobbying effort to attack Linux based on this situation.
Sort of a "Linux Worm Creates Attack Network! You must legislate against the danger of this- did you know Linux installations often have compilers and linkers installed right alongside *spit* Netscape? An evil hacker's toybox it is! Why, on these Linux PCs, a worm could compile ANYTHING AT ALL it wanted to, with the support of the operating system! At least make sure there aren't any of these insecure Unix devices in the armed forces. Do you care about America or are you a Linux supporting terrorist?"
OK, I ran with that a bit- but what do you think these armies of MS lobbyists actually SAY? "Buy our stuff, it's okay and not too expensive really?"
Of course- that's the problem. Digital media makes information so liquid that it's really tough to meter it. You've got to figure out some way to operate that's more than just information scarcity.
I can't help but think that photographer should simply leave the cameras at home and go out to weddings with scenery and LIGHTING... amateurs simply do not understand lighting... she could charge the same price for simply directing photographic situations. A full complement of lights, the right setting, and it's *tweet!* bring over all the amateur digicam people and have THEM do the photo taking. It'd come out much better than their usual stuff. She could have some prosumer digicam herself, but not consider for a moment that the resulting images were what she'd be charging for.
I've been fooling with studio building for a long time now- and currently my focus hasn't been on assembling a bunch of recorders and stuff- people can do that in their homes so easily that it's a tough sell even if I can trounce their quality levels. Instead, I've been getting TOYS. Guitars, basses, now an electronic drum trigger kit (eventually a real acoustic drumkit). People can have all sorts of (half the time warez) software for recording, but they will NOT typically have a mesh-head drum trigger kit to bash away at. I'm hoping to expand that out until I can get business as a studio- NOT for having recording equipment, maybe some people will even want to bring their PCs and use their own! Instead, it will be for having a killer SETTING and the environment that you just don't see in most pocket studios.
It's like that. I hope like hell I'm making the right call here but I honestly don't see how else to do it. The actual media is next to valueless, but making the environment for the media to be produced can be all the difference.
I once produced some totally pro-looking product shots for guitar boxes I make, on an old Connectix Color Quickcam (640x480 webcam). Did it by using the sun for lighting, using a big curtain for strong diffusion where needed, taking lots of identical (except for lighting variations) pictures and averaging them together in software... couldn't overcome the resolution issues but dynamic range ended up being phenomenal, easily pro level...
And of course, there was a time when I could've told you that in a book and probably sold lots of them because it's such a killer effective trick, but now in the digital age I've just replicated those words God knows how many times over the internet for basically nothing, and have to hope that (a) it'll benefit people to know about PTAverage and averaging near-identical digicam pics together for dynamic range, and (b) if I keep giving good ideas, people might figure out that I tend to have them, and record in my studio or something:)
It's really quite a braintwister figuring out what constitutes work and value in an age of digital replication. It's like, to go into the future we need to DESTROY the idea of value for individual collections of bits and somehow reformulate business around expertise and convenience. In that light, the whole 'piracy' thing is counterproductive because it's a concerted attempt to teach people that copying is morally wrong, when it's still effectively costless and effortless.
What would the world be like if ALL copying was completely permitted and there was no IP at all, but then people had to seek out the producers of any particular new thing they wanted produced? Would it be abundance? Would it be drowning in media all of which was worthless?
I think it's the same few guys continually saying this- seems just a little bit psychotic to be talking about the 'zenith' of the Mac, and continually referring to it as a platform in decline, when the crazy thing is these guys tend to be pointing to the Performa era as 'zenith'... and claiming that the entire post-Jobs iMac era was all downhill.
Man, gimme some of what you're smoking. I could _sell_ that for some really serious money:D
"shocking what the 2 year failure rate is for the average PC."
Computers fail? O_O
I'm typing this on a PowerMac 9500 I got used years ago and have done dreadful things to. In the other room is an 8500 which is also chugging along just fine. I'm retiring a Performa 575 (33mhz 68040) which I was using for MIDI sequencing, which is also chugging along just fine, and I have a small collection of antique Mac Plusses and a Classic, C.A.J.F. again. I think one broke once. Also my Dad had a 6500 (?) that died- but those are known to be lemons anyway.
I take it some PCs just sort of die? More to the point, they die in only two years? I prefer getting over 10 years of use out of a computer... of course I don't upgrade much...
No. All they're saying is, they didn't use anyone capable of distinguishing much in the way of sound quality past a certain point. It proves nothing.
I run an indie mastering house with room treatment and scary homebrew monitors, and I've distinguished 256K mp3 from 16 bit AIFF in an ABX double-blind test. I've also got very close to distinguishing dithered 16 bit from truncated 16 bit audio (only about 94% confidence- my ear gave out after about 10 trials! Fatigue!). Ogg Vorbis' strengths are absolutely relevant for high bit depths.
In fact I've done an objective study on it- feeding encoders a 'torture test' sample, subtracting the spectrogram of it from the spectrogram of the original and looking at what was changed. Across the board, Ogg Vorbis does better than mp3 at maintaining both tonal purity and transient accuracy. Pretty much ALL mp3 encoders at ANY bit rate have to make a choice between these qualities, Ogg consistently manages to preserve both at once. At high bit rates it combines the tonal purity of BladeEnc with the transient aggression of Fraunhofer, while both of those encoders make a mess of each other's strong points at any bit rate- Fraunhofer never sounds really tonally convincing, and Blade can't do transients at any bit rate.
I would say that Ogg Vorbis is BEST at really high bit rates. You can always strip it if you want lower bit rates out of it...
Seriously. Why? You're talking about Microsoft making money. We already know they do this in many ways, not all of which involve competing in a market dynamic on the basis of product quality. More relevantly, your specific point was, in the end they want to make money. There are other motives- wanting to work in a specific field, wanting to benefit the world, wanting to buy up the state of Washington and turn it into a nature preserve so geeks can go big game hunting with digital cameras- there are motives that involve DOING things or BEING things, positive things, negative things, whatever.
If the bottom line is no more than making the most money, they become a poster child for the ugliest repercussions of untrammeled, self-consuming capitalism. They have NO GOALS if that's all it is to them. They could just as well do it all with paper games on Wall Street and not even care what they're producing in terms of software (and in fact they are doing essentially that). They have no connection to the world apart from Hoovering money and 'valuation' from others and accumulating it, only to blow up when they can't maintain the expanding valuation.
I am serious. Why should I respect that in the slightest? Tell me something they want that's more than 'make money'. I don't care if it's 'control the entire world and replace governments'. That is evil and I still respect it more than the brainless, cancerous 'make money'. If you think 'make money' is enough, you haven't ever thought deeply about what you're doing, or what Microsoft is doing, or what capitalism is for. It's not an end in itself, it is a mechanism for society. Treated as an end in itself it is pathological.
Slashdot Mirror
I could go, "But doing it would avoid stultifying science, and everybody progresses more rapidly", but if your ONLY yardstick is how much you're stomping your immediate competitor, why would you care?
Welcome to the new Dark Ages. Thanks a lot for your contribution.
Also, isn't what patents were 'intended' for also a moot point?
Palladium is in such a nebulous, unimplemented state that nobody's even been putting the words 'boycott Palladium' together yet. Hardly a surprise- where DO you go to buy a Palladium anyway? How do you boycott something you can't buy yet?
What you mean is, "Microsoft has already got a long-term plan". Big woop- that's their job, and that's served them well in the past. Now it's time to make their lives hell if they mean to implement this one. They'll wind up with 1/3 of their desired goals and like it. It's a time-honored technique, of aiming way high and then 'reluctantly settling' for what you would've been happy with anyway...
MS yelling 'copyright infringement' can be translated to mean 'shut this down!' and immediately raises issues of what the developer's rights and requirements are, on both sides.
On the one side, the developer under Shared Source does not have any right to any specific ideas- hence the yelling of 'infringement', MS could pick some patent or other and claim it's infringed. At that point, the developer is 'out of the pool': it's been proven that he or she is privy to Microsoft secrets but has no right to them, and the same tactic can work again and again. Unlike a normal person that developer's made admissions in the licensing agreement that they HAVE been aware of such secrets. For most people, it would be necessary to show that they were privy to the information.
On the GPL side it's simpler: anyone in that kind of a legal bind cannot both satisfy the other license and the GPL. If they can't fully satisfy the constraints of the other agreements and the GPL, they were never really legally releasing code under the GPL. It may look like GPLed code, and have the same licenses written on it, but if the guy can't legally release under the GPL and is releasing anyway, he's ILLEGALLY releasing under the GPL, with no rights to do so. Any code released under those conditions needs to be discarded- and the body of Free Software developers can't be held responsible for the acts of a criminal, beyond making voluntary efforts to discard the tainted code. This bears repeating- rather than instantly 'taint' the whole Free world, legally the impact is more likely to be like an oil spill- to be cleaned up as much as practical. Otherwise it's like 'the oil tanker crashed and oil spilled! Quick! Get rid of the tainted Atlantic Ocean!'
I am not a lawyer. I do think my points are valid, though. When legalisms are crazy but still applicable, that's not so much a sign that nonlawyers should defer to lawyers- it's more a sign saying that legalism is on thin ice. Any speculation that accidental mixture of SS and GPL (hmmmm, SS...) would cause instant catastrophic failure of the Free world, is damned thin ice. Law doesn't work that way- and even if it reduced to pedantic details of the SS license, the same pedantic reading of the GPL would show that the infringing developer was automatically disqualified from releasing under the GPL. Doesn't matter if they did release anyway- that would be the oil spill to be cleaned up, and you cannot hold an entire community responsible for the acts of one person who was in fact violating the primary rules of the community in their actions.
Their licensing for that stuff is viral, and the payload is several admissions with powerful legal implications- that you cannot use patents against Microsoft, and more dangerously, the admission that you have seen Microsoft code and ideas (some of which may be patented) and concede first that you've seen it and remembered it, and second that you don't really have any right to it. These admissions make any developer privy to Shared Source code guilty unless proved innocent of copyright infringement and/or patent infringement, and are a powerful weapon for use by the MS legal team.
Homer's gone off halfcocked (the lawyers will NOT be going 'look he stole our ifs and printfs') but the underlying point is as real as cancer and shouldn't be discounted. The lawyers will be going 'did you or did you not agree to this shared source license agreement? Here are records of you having worked with this code, your only legal avenue of doing so having been the Shared Source licensing agreement.' Kaching. End of game- and that developer remains tainted FOR LIFE!
Yes, it's that serious- as long as there are lawyers, and that agreement is legally sound. And note who is responsible for asserting that it is...
Think a level deeper. Of the people you mentioned, who among them would EVER have a reason to 'upgrade', or would even notice if they 'upgraded' in name only and secretly kept running what they knew, for years and years?
That's the punch-line: Microsoft needs people to grow and become clever and program-savvy and use lots of new features, in order to sell them new software very often. The very argument you use to put down Linux is also the reason Microsoft's position is tenuous... almost nobody NEEDS to continually purchase new Microsoft software. They do so because they're begged to. It's like a favor. An expensive favor...
That day may be coming rapidly, but so far it is STILL possible to produce patentable ideas and put them out unfettered into the world- like academics used to do before academia became a profit center.
NOT YET! Slow down! Don't be talking 'GPL Patent' until it's really unavoidable! It may have escaped your attention but free distribution of ideas IS still possible, even though patents do exist.
This may be merely temporary, depending on just how much patent examiners expect the courts to do the work of checking to see if something's got prior art. If it's up to the courts, then everything will be patented, by companies who can afford to threaten legal battles against the true, ill-funded inventors- and that'll be real 'piracy', as in 'arrrr! give me that, no you can't have it!'
The GPL itself would not exist or have to exist were it not for copyright that was automatic. The equivalent in the patent sphere would be a legal admission that no possible idea can exist in the wild free for use- that everything was someone's property. And that's not happened yet!
They sure do- mp3.com was what Michael Robertson did before he started messing with Linux through 'Lindows' and charging people for access to Debian mirrors and attempting to place restrictions like "please do not make copies of this software for your friends".
mp3.com is now owned by Vivendi International- it's part of the majors. It mostly touts major label promos now- signing up with mp3.com means you permanently give up certain rights to your material- and if they don't want to pay you, they won't, they'll make up and excuse and kick you off rather than pay you.
Worst of both worlds- be warned.
Sorry- I've lost patience with slashdotter smackdowns that have no justification. Dunno who you are, or whether you were having a bad day or what- points for not being an anonymous coward, anyway- but aeroelasticity dates back to the first jet bomber, the B-47, pattern for the later Boeing jet airliners, and it is precisely the word they used. No, I didn't design it: yes, I figured out that everything bends under stress and has elasticity many years ago, thank you.
Geez. Must be something in the water making Slashdotters cranky. Even I'm kinda cranky :D
What's being talked about here is DIRECTED aeroelastic wings, even more elastic than the Boeing jets. Sounds like a neat idea :) sure as hell would result in control surface effectiveness! Not only no control surface gaps, but the whole damn wing's a control surface. In addition, this could also trim the wings to act as flaps, changing wing incidence on the fly.
No, this guy's speakers aren't that great.
There are some good points, however. He's doing nothing of note constructionwise, but the larger choice of the sonotube has significant advantages and disadvantages. Big plus: tube shape means walls CANNOT flex from pressure. That allows for potentially thunderous reproduction of the sound coming out, without overhang or weakening of the fundamental. Big minus: the sound coming out is strongly colored by the inside of the enclosure being the second worst possible shape in the universe- worst is a sphere. Testing has shown that these shapes are the best possible for the outside of an enclosure, but the worst for the inside.
What I've found works best for really serious bass is multiple drivers of gradiated sizes. My mains are running 6.5/8/10/12 drivers series-parallel like a Marshall cab- wattage is comparable to four of the weakest speaker (6.5) series-parallel, because that's the one that'd blow first. I have a narrow but absurdly deep cabinet, internal walls, bottom two sections ported and the top two open-backed. I had acoustic foam in there but found that it sounded better in the mids to leave it totally open, since all the resonance and reverberation goes straight out the back. The bottom, with the 10 and 12, has two good-sized ports, but since the box is so big (and it's running acoustic suspension drivers, too) the port only extends the lows further- it is not tuned high enough to make 'one note bass', it's reinforcing the really extreme lows.
If you want a REAL geek audio project, make some supertweeters like I did. Small piezo drivers (I'm using some fairly rigid and tough-to-solder-to ones I got in bulk), mount them on something solid while leaving the middle free to flex (rigid mounting like superglue, not a soft gasket), and then take some envelopes with that clear cellophane stuff that crackles easily if you rumple it. Cut out rectangular pieces big enough that you can make an 'M'- you're going to be making a degradation of the Lineaum cylindrical driver. That requires a piece to translate piezo flex into true linear motion- as shown in the *spit* patent- this skips the bridge piece and applies flexing-disc vibration directly to the leaves of the driver. In doing so it fails to be a proper line source- but the weight of the moving mass is that much less!
Take two 'leaves' and superglue them together at the base. You can trim them a bit so there's a slight ) shape to the part that'll be glued to the piezo. Take a bit of acoustic foam, superglue the outside of the sandwich of cellophane on one side to it, attach it to the speaker to the side of the piezo (which you should have wired up already). Then do the same to the other side- you want a 'm', seen from the top, with the middle bit resting directly on the piezo. The 'm' shouldn't be too tall, but it does have to form full half-cylinders- it shouldn't be flat. Finally, if it's all good, put a dot of superglue on the middle of the piezo, and allow the center of the 'm' to be attached permanently.
How it works: pressure from the piezo displaces the cellophane. Since it's two loose semicylinders, it flexes, choosing to compress together at first rather than shift the whole structure outwards. Surprise! The semicylinders form an exponential horn- and you've just compressed the throat, forcing air out! In addition, the wave will travel outward from the center, until it dissipates by air resistance and eventually the acoustic foam mounting at the far end. This tweeter goes up forever, way beyond CD capabilities, very cleanly, and it also has phenomenal dispersion characteristics- very wide soundfield, virtually no beaming. The difference is not subtle.
In a perfect world, lots of people could work with this technique and develop it as free software is developed. I've seen the patents on the _refined_ version of this- involving a bridge piece between the (not truly linear) driver and the base of the cylinders- and until the patents expire, this is officially proprietary.
I am sure that will dissuade MANY slashdotters from getting cellophane, piezos and superglue, and building their own supertweeters. Don't you people know developing on ideas someone else had is wrong? Remember, whoever-it-was who said, "If I have failed to see farther, it is because I wasn't allowed to stand on anybody's shoulders, so there" ;)
Why have I taken so much effort to communicate this technique? Because I'm a speaker designer myself. I have numerous ideas that are in fact mine, and hybrids of those with things like the Linaeum cylindrical driver, some of which are just terrific. And I'm very annoyed by a reality in which I cannot function as a simple artisan and idea-haver, without patent-wrestling with corporations- and in which I can't even go ahead with my own stuff, as corporations will take anything that's really good, and patent it since I won't, possibly even stopping me from using something I've invented. It makes you want to hide and never build anything.
There's nothing to do but go ahead anyway, but understand that my 'outing' of a homebrew way to do a degraded form of the Lineaum piezo driver patent is a combination of 'power to the people' and simple bitterness. What would have happened if the person to make the first cone driver had locked it up with patents, filed extensions, retained control of it to the present day? There'd be virtually no speakers, is what.
I feel the ideas that MOST deserve patent protection are the ones that most harm the scientific environment through their being guarded by lawyers. 'swinging sideways on a swing' patents are harmless. The ones that are REALLY GOOD are the ones that NEED to disseminate out into society.
*ROFL*
You see, this is the problem with you and your Rand there. Do you not understand that most people, seeing the words 'human rights', will think of SOCIETAL benefit rather than some hypothetical 'I get to do whatever I want' system in which 'human rights' means 'kill the unfit'?
Don't read Atlas Shrugged because it sucks and is endless boring ranting- the actual ideas can be found more cheaply in the posts of many Slashdot posters, saving you the trouble of acquiring the actual book.
But don't believe Ayn Rand because the woman was so scarred by Stalinism that she went to the opposite extreme, totally rejecting ALL societal benefit and trying to construct a society of ideally rational superhumans, of which she was the infallible leader (I do not exaggerate- she did consider herself infallible.)
In your evaluation of Ayn Rand and whether to bother with her, consider that she would have not only agreed with the statement "Anyone who tells you not to read atlas shrugged is, by definition, someone who wants to eliminate human rights"... she also would have told you that such a person was so fundamentally dishonest and committed to deception that they could not be listened to on ANY SUBJECT. In essence, she'd tell you that such a person could not hold such an opinion without secretly believing in Atlas Shrugged but maliciously professing the opposite for some evil purpose: to her, her ideas were so unchallengable that one COULD NOT disagree without being insane or intentionally falsifying.
Those of us who consider Ayn Rand was a dangerous loony can make a pretty good case for it, really. And no, that doesn't mean that all her ideas are invalid- but she was crippled by demonizing the very idea of collective society itself.
When our society (here in the US) resembles Stalinist USSR, then you can demonize collective society. Oddly, though, this movement in the direction of Cold War Russia is being spearheaded by the selfish, and resisted by the more socially aware...
That's why something like legislation to prevent abusive contracts is valid. You simply DO NOT expect dumb musician kids to be able to out-think treacherous old music industry lawyers- or expect them to be able to find a qualified lawyer who is not sitting on BOTH SIDES of the table. You do know that in entertainment law there's a risk that the lawyer you 'intelligently' hire can be, undisclosed, working for the record company too- and in a crunch can end up taking their side not yours? You can't expect musician kids to deal with a reality like that.
I don't agree with that.
You have to protect some of the people who will be doing some dumb things some of the time. Yeah, there's a limit, but you're saying it should never be done at all. I disagree. Strongly. And if you feel like you can be 100% rational all the time, you must be a hell of an annoying dude ;)
Or are you part of the "you are 0wn3d, suck it up and deal until you're dead" crowd?
I'm sorry, but regrettably some of us are less cowardly than that- and you can't possibly change anything by refusing to try. Call it wasted effort if you want- thankfully it's not up to you.
I live in a state with a Socialist representative- Vermont, with our Bernie Sanders, whom we appreciate. The guy writes up anticorporatist essays to put on his House web site. I vote Progressive because someone had the balls to come to my door and talk to me, with flyers and stuff for the basic tenets of the Progressives (including daring stuff such as maximum wage), otherwise I might still be more of an apolitical doormat.
Be a doormat if you want, but do you really expect other people NOT to organize? Look at what's happening!
These guys make the Nixon administration look good. At least THEY were focused almost entirely on Nixon's re-election at all costs! This time the administration assumes it's gonna be a dynasty and has gone straight on to trying to roll back the clock to a hybrid of the Middle and Industrial ages on ideological grounds- and certain ideas are not allowed to be expressed.
It's easy to see that this is an assault on the ideas being shut out- but what a lot of people are missing is that it is also crippling to the administration itself, because if any of those ideas are in fact a serious danger being covered up, the situation will turn a danger into a huge disaster through refusal to acknowledge the problem.
We have got to get rid of this administration. I hope something like impeachment can be carried out. Whatever its political and ideological views, the one thing an administration cannot do is take a 'I'm not listening, I'm not listening!' approach. Mockery and contempt is not enough. This is dangerous. And they're doing it with regard to EVERYTHING.
Since when is 'tell me only exactly what I want to hear' responsible? It is gross incompetence. The people doing this should be fired- not for some moral sin, but for gross irresponsibility and damaging the flow of information to the Chief Executive. They have a RESPONSIBILITY to be passing useful data up the chain of command. I don't care if the guy only wants to hear good news- that only means HE is incompetent too and doesn't change a thing. They are obligated to not do this!
Specifically, at the time there was a new genre turning up in the underground- 'noise', an offshoot of Industrial. (This story came up when my friend learned I'd done a 'noise' album)
The labels (at least the one my friend was in contact with) saw this happening and heard the initial buzz. Not wanting to be caught off-guard, they sent out A&R reps and promptly signed up ALL the noise bands- to $5000 contracts with an option to release an album.
That option was not the band's. It was the record company's. They'd effectively taken that entire scene off the market- the contracts didn't require that the label release or do ANYTHING. It was just a $5000 advance, nothing further ever had to be done- and those bands were off the market, contractually bound to not sign with anyone else, effectively neutralized. No records were ever released as 'Noise' is not the poppiest of genres :)
Maybe you're not paranoid enough. You do understand that labels can and will 'sign' bands like that to a contract that requires nothing on behalf of the label? $5000 to be taken out of the game for X many years so no other label can have you.
The real answer to that is, don't sign anything, even a post-it note. Labels customarily begin things by a informal-looking jotted-down note, preferably on the back of an envelope or something, saying 'we agree to come to an agreement with the label', and have the band sign that in exchange for immediate money. It's legally binding and at that point the band MUST sign, and the label hasn't even specified any terms yet.
Just treat them like used-car salesmen or spammers or 'wealthy Nigerian investors seeking assistance with the sum of $49,000,000 to be transferred to a US bank'. There's really no such word as paranoia when dealing with these guys.
There's 20,000 other bands whom the label can spend promo money on, who WON'T get a smart lawyer. Who needs you?
Yeah, that would be insane- but the question to ask is, do they have the lobbying and PR muscle to pull it off? Microsoft's style of winning is not wholly restricted to utter Forrest Gump truthfulness. I see this as a sort of Xmas present for them, and I see them trying to figure out just this: whether they can launch a lobbying effort to attack Linux based on this situation.
Sort of a "Linux Worm Creates Attack Network! You must legislate against the danger of this- did you know Linux installations often have compilers and linkers installed right alongside *spit* Netscape? An evil hacker's toybox it is! Why, on these Linux PCs, a worm could compile ANYTHING AT ALL it wanted to, with the support of the operating system! At least make sure there aren't any of these insecure Unix devices in the armed forces. Do you care about America or are you a Linux supporting terrorist?"
OK, I ran with that a bit- but what do you think these armies of MS lobbyists actually SAY? "Buy our stuff, it's okay and not too expensive really?"
I can't help but think that photographer should simply leave the cameras at home and go out to weddings with scenery and LIGHTING... amateurs simply do not understand lighting... she could charge the same price for simply directing photographic situations. A full complement of lights, the right setting, and it's *tweet!* bring over all the amateur digicam people and have THEM do the photo taking. It'd come out much better than their usual stuff. She could have some prosumer digicam herself, but not consider for a moment that the resulting images were what she'd be charging for.
I've been fooling with studio building for a long time now- and currently my focus hasn't been on assembling a bunch of recorders and stuff- people can do that in their homes so easily that it's a tough sell even if I can trounce their quality levels. Instead, I've been getting TOYS. Guitars, basses, now an electronic drum trigger kit (eventually a real acoustic drumkit). People can have all sorts of (half the time warez) software for recording, but they will NOT typically have a mesh-head drum trigger kit to bash away at. I'm hoping to expand that out until I can get business as a studio- NOT for having recording equipment, maybe some people will even want to bring their PCs and use their own! Instead, it will be for having a killer SETTING and the environment that you just don't see in most pocket studios.
It's like that. I hope like hell I'm making the right call here but I honestly don't see how else to do it. The actual media is next to valueless, but making the environment for the media to be produced can be all the difference.
I once produced some totally pro-looking product shots for guitar boxes I make, on an old Connectix Color Quickcam (640x480 webcam). Did it by using the sun for lighting, using a big curtain for strong diffusion where needed, taking lots of identical (except for lighting variations) pictures and averaging them together in software... couldn't overcome the resolution issues but dynamic range ended up being phenomenal, easily pro level...
And of course, there was a time when I could've told you that in a book and probably sold lots of them because it's such a killer effective trick, but now in the digital age I've just replicated those words God knows how many times over the internet for basically nothing, and have to hope that (a) it'll benefit people to know about PTAverage and averaging near-identical digicam pics together for dynamic range, and (b) if I keep giving good ideas, people might figure out that I tend to have them, and record in my studio or something :)
It's really quite a braintwister figuring out what constitutes work and value in an age of digital replication. It's like, to go into the future we need to DESTROY the idea of value for individual collections of bits and somehow reformulate business around expertise and convenience. In that light, the whole 'piracy' thing is counterproductive because it's a concerted attempt to teach people that copying is morally wrong, when it's still effectively costless and effortless.
What would the world be like if ALL copying was completely permitted and there was no IP at all, but then people had to seek out the producers of any particular new thing they wanted produced? Would it be abundance? Would it be drowning in media all of which was worthless?
Man, gimme some of what you're smoking. I could _sell_ that for some really serious money :D
Computers fail? O_O
I'm typing this on a PowerMac 9500 I got used years ago and have done dreadful things to. In the other room is an 8500 which is also chugging along just fine. I'm retiring a Performa 575 (33mhz 68040) which I was using for MIDI sequencing, which is also chugging along just fine, and I have a small collection of antique Mac Plusses and a Classic, C.A.J.F. again. I think one broke once. Also my Dad had a 6500 (?) that died- but those are known to be lemons anyway.
I take it some PCs just sort of die? More to the point, they die in only two years? I prefer getting over 10 years of use out of a computer... of course I don't upgrade much...
I run an indie mastering house with room treatment and scary homebrew monitors, and I've distinguished 256K mp3 from 16 bit AIFF in an ABX double-blind test. I've also got very close to distinguishing dithered 16 bit from truncated 16 bit audio (only about 94% confidence- my ear gave out after about 10 trials! Fatigue!). Ogg Vorbis' strengths are absolutely relevant for high bit depths.
In fact I've done an objective study on it- feeding encoders a 'torture test' sample, subtracting the spectrogram of it from the spectrogram of the original and looking at what was changed. Across the board, Ogg Vorbis does better than mp3 at maintaining both tonal purity and transient accuracy. Pretty much ALL mp3 encoders at ANY bit rate have to make a choice between these qualities, Ogg consistently manages to preserve both at once. At high bit rates it combines the tonal purity of BladeEnc with the transient aggression of Fraunhofer, while both of those encoders make a mess of each other's strong points at any bit rate- Fraunhofer never sounds really tonally convincing, and Blade can't do transients at any bit rate.
I would say that Ogg Vorbis is BEST at really high bit rates. You can always strip it if you want lower bit rates out of it...
Why?
Seriously. Why? You're talking about Microsoft making money. We already know they do this in many ways, not all of which involve competing in a market dynamic on the basis of product quality. More relevantly, your specific point was, in the end they want to make money. There are other motives- wanting to work in a specific field, wanting to benefit the world, wanting to buy up the state of Washington and turn it into a nature preserve so geeks can go big game hunting with digital cameras- there are motives that involve DOING things or BEING things, positive things, negative things, whatever.
If the bottom line is no more than making the most money, they become a poster child for the ugliest repercussions of untrammeled, self-consuming capitalism. They have NO GOALS if that's all it is to them. They could just as well do it all with paper games on Wall Street and not even care what they're producing in terms of software (and in fact they are doing essentially that). They have no connection to the world apart from Hoovering money and 'valuation' from others and accumulating it, only to blow up when they can't maintain the expanding valuation.
I am serious. Why should I respect that in the slightest? Tell me something they want that's more than 'make money'. I don't care if it's 'control the entire world and replace governments'. That is evil and I still respect it more than the brainless, cancerous 'make money'. If you think 'make money' is enough, you haven't ever thought deeply about what you're doing, or what Microsoft is doing, or what capitalism is for. It's not an end in itself, it is a mechanism for society. Treated as an end in itself it is pathological.