Re:It's a new world, folks, adjust your arguments
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Surveillance Update
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· Score: 2
Tough. You can't have safety and be part of a world that contains non-US interests. 9/11 proved that beyond the shadow of a doubt. Your only options:
take responsibility and start doing the extensive work to get along in a world that doesn't get along- namely, make enough effort that talking to the US always seems more effective than flying airliners into buildings
blow up everybody else, have fighter jets destroy anything attempting to enter US airspace no matter what it is, and return at all costs to 'what, me worry?' status
gee, let's continue doing whatever the hell we want to the rest of the world no matter how upset that makes them, but crack down on our OWN CITIZENS and whip them into shape. That way, we can become the dictatorship that our President has openly said he wishes he had (it'd be easier), and genuinely, truly deserve to be attacked by any means necessary. And then we'll all be on the same page!
This is not an internal security issue, not even remotely. It is a foreign policy issue. And that is our most dangerous weakness as a country run by a leader who probably can't even spell 'foreign'. These guys make Kissinger look good- at least he was manipulative and evil from a position of understanding and study... Machiavellian, but there's something to be said for doing the homework. Without it, it's like trying to body-check oncoming traffic.
Of course, we now have banks sharing data outside of any government, for their own agendas. I can't even guess what will transpire from that- terrorists and suspected terrorists and other bad people, oh my! Color me impressed. No, color me good. Please?:P
I love it, more rabid crazed assaults of lawyers and automated computer hacking to BEAT THE HELL out of those HORRIBLE PEOPLE who are EVIL and WICKED enough to SHARE stuff...
News fucking flash, Einsteins: if you don't want people to copy your material?
STOP SELLING IT.
I'm not joking. Do you think X many people downloaded copies of the Spiderman movie because it was an artistic high-water-mark for filmic experience? How many people download copies of the best indie art films versus the worst Hollywood experiences in cynicism and lowest common denominator?
It's not even ABOUT the content. It's about the marketing. Some people seem to not even care what the hell they're producing- they'll tailor it to their crude notion of what 'everybody' will like, and then dump tons of money into marketing, trying to get everyone without taste to go 'duh, I'm gonna see that!' And they are surprised when people end up doing this in unauthorised ways?
I have a dream- perhaps it is an unrealistic dream, but it is my own- that one day, if I spend years of my life producing say a film or CD or something, and have no resources left for MARKETING, that it will go out there into a world where groups of people, innovative companies, Big Media outlets have taken on the role of scanning through all the Content people have produced all over the world. Not searching for unauthorized copies of overmarketed, cynical garbage, but searching for stuff that's GOOD. Finding ever-finer subgroups of people who'd think a certain thing was good. Finding ways to hook those people up to the other people in the world producing Content.
That I'll see a day when George Lucas goes on strike... and nobody notices.
Anyone with me? If you are: screw the mass market, find something you love and do it to within an inch of its life. The weirder, the more personal, the better. Be READY. Because we can't have this world until we give up being consumers and start being human beings, individuals, until we're ready to say 'you know, come to think of it most people WOULDN'T like this thing that I like, but I don't even care anymore'.
I understand that you have read this somewhere, but you are not necessarily qualified to hold an opinion on this matter.
I do work with digital audio, design wordlength reduction, and I subjected myself to an ABX double blind test in which I attempted to tell the difference between 16 bit truncated audio and 16 bit dithered audio, using a dither specially chosen to produce the same amount of error energy (measured RMS) as truncation does. (TPDF actually produces 107% of the error energy of truncation, measured RMS! It's the added noise showing up)
This was exhausting. I only tried it once, because typically I have real work to do, not Usenet-style wanking and answering unending 'double blind challenges'. My peak performance was a run of eight correct identifications in a row- this was after two initial failures, giving a 94% chance I was hearing this difference up to that point. Then I stopped hearing it- I got tired, and frankly this is a level of detail that's easy to sense but not easy to pin down. You get a subtle coloring of everything with issues at that level, but if you try to concentrate on it you pick out larger-scale details and lose track, and stress will wipe you out right away.
Now, you are perfectly free to insist against all odds (well, insist with six percent chance you're right) that it was a fluke and I can't actually hear the difference between two different ways of reducing to 16 bit. I wouldn't dream of stopping you, and in fact I'd give high odds that YOU cannot do this: that's not your job.
However, if you think 'the human ear' can only tell differences up to 13 bits, you are crazy, or not even trying, or have a lousy ear, or have been reading things early digital apologists claimed without once questioning them. In fact, that claim is nonsense, the result of a long chain of unwarranted assumptions and generalizations. If you wrote code like that, it'd crash. Since it is merely an article of faith, you merely contradict obvious reality by claiming it...
CDs are WAY un-perfect. It's amazing how much work you have to do to get them even to the point of rivalling vinyl records, and we all know how flawed those are. CD flaws are totally orthoganal to vinyl records, and minimizing them involves totally different approaches- and you may simply have a totally tin ear for the flaws of digital. I know I have a tin ear for the flaws of analog- I can easily hear 'past' vinyl surface noise, for instance, and I know some people can't tune it out. I guess the difference between you and me is, when people claim they're sensitive to the pitch issues, surface noise issues, harmonic distortion issues of LPs, I believe them. It just doesn't bother ME. By contrast you're more or less insisting that because you can't hear the failings of digital, nobody else can. But they are not only there, they are about as far from 'real life' as vinyl records are- just in totally different ways.
Hang on a second there. It's not my type either, but possibly unlike you I've done serious musical work in a genre just as 'shit' and seen the results.
I've been playing guitar, building gear, fooling with synthesizers etc. for years and years (see URL link), and after doing music on the Net for a little while, I stumbled across something unexpected. It was called 'Noise'. I went, "hey, really? I bet when I was a stoned teenager I did better 'noise' than that", and then I looked into it a little. And wow! One guy was putting wireless mics in a clothes dryer with bricks. Someone else had written a passionate statement of what NOISE, true NOISE really was. It was uncompromising- no beat, no melody, you had to be getting into producing a blast of brutal sound or you weren't Noise... and I realised, hey, that was part of MY musical background. There were other people into that. It didn't matter that any sane person would turn the result off with a spastic lunge at the 'OFF DEAR GOD TURN IT OFF' button. What mattered was, there were people who WANTED what I used to do with sound.
Result: Hard Vacuum. Knowing there were people who were hardcore fans, I took some of my gear (a three-band compressor I'd built and a shortwave radio) and, in just one long intense session, recorded a whole CD's worth of noise performances, making heavy use of shortwave interference, satellite noises and circuit disruption. For one of the tracks I pulled the plug on the equipment to stop it, resulting in a classic 'weeeeoooooooSNRK' dying electronics noise. It was great! I drew on all the twisted teenager delight in abrasive unmusical noise, combined with a lot of years of musical development telling me when to change it up, keep it moving, go for different effects and results.
That album has been one of my most successful albums. There's stuff I've done where I spent days laboring over detailed little sequenced parts or played until my fingers were blistered, that still hasn't been as popular as this crazed noise crap that was seemingly effortless and talentless.
Why is this? Because there are people for whom raw noise expresses their feelings, their selves- seemingly normal people whose inner 'music' is like RAARRRRRRSSSJJJKKKKKFFTTTTZZZZZBK and most people can't do that, not sincerely, not with understanding. You get people trying to do 'noise' by making little techno ditties using noises for beats, and it is like comparing a wolf with a poodle- somehow even insulting, you want to go 'do you even understand this?'. And with me, it's the wild breed of Noise in its purest form, and anyone into Noise instantly gets a hit off of that and instantly KNOWS 'yeah, this guy gets it'. And I keep meeting people like that. One guy wanted me to come out to do live gigs with him. You'd think there wouldn't be many people into this, but the ones that are, are seriously into it.
And that's what this 'lowercase' stuff is about. It's not the same genre (though I bet they'd understand my noise work, even if it's way too loud for them), but it's the same deal. If you don't like it, well congratulations, join the majority, and you forfeit any possible claim that you understand what's going on here. It's not being done for you. It's never gonna be done for you. If they wanted to make music for YOU, they'd be doing something completely different.
Absolutely. Lucas is wrong. I have the original VHS 'uncorrected' releases of IV-V-VI and they define a cinematic language that is what made Lucas his money and got him his fame.
Lucas wanted 'Phantom Menace' scale from the beginning, but he couldn't have it. From space battles to interiors, his budget spelled out constraints on sets, on effects: Mos Eisley spaceport was like 20 feet of wall, Cloud City was several lengths of corridor, in-fighter reaction shots were restricted to extreme close-ups with little or no external views visible: the budget and the technology was hugely restrictive.
Through this limitation, Lucas produced BIG, CLEAR images that 'read' instantly, delivered the relevant story points without a single wasted visual element, and MOVED... both in the sense of a violent through-frame motion, and in terms of not lingering for a single wasted second over the effect as effect, but slamming past it to the next scene for a sense of headlong motion in terms of sheer film.
And all the time, he only wanted to make 'Ben Hur' with droids- pull the camera back, linger and ogle the worlds of his fantasy.
Well, now he can. And it sucks. And I'm taking good care of my old VHS tapes and pray they don't come to harm- because THAT was what made Lucas's legend. It's not what he wanted- that's boring. Cast of thousands, millions of worlds, billions of extras is boring. The synergy between this desire and the constraints of reality produced incredibly vivid, up-front, aggressive film, all because Lucas constantly wanted to cover up his failure to truly accomplish what HE wanted to see.
I hope there are 70mm (even 35mm) prints out there of the original films, being stored safely, because Lucas is the worst possible saboteur of his own filmed legacy- not through selling out, but through trying to realize the actually-boring ambitions he'd had from the start.
Vinyl is largely harmonic distortions, CD is largely inharmonic distortions. The latter are damaging at far lower levels than harmonic distortions, and have different effects on the sound. If you fry out a recording with a bunch of inharmonic distortion (example: realaudio) it doesn't matter if it can pass a 0hz-20K test tone, the fact is if you play a voice through it you'll lose everything in the way of emotive overtones and subtle sonic cues. The problem is more in the domain of resolution than frequency response.
"records, as far as I know, can produce a far wider range of frequencies than the CD, who's 'inaudible' frequencies are lopped off the top and bottom end of a CD's audio data"
Uh, no.
Digital audio can encode data down to zero hertz, and arguably is good enough going up to 22.050K. The area to watch is not frequency response, but resolution: in other words, dynamic range. This is why the greatest breakthroughs in digital sound quality have been with 24-bit digital and wordlength reduction, not upping the sampling rate. If you have 16 bit audio, quiet sounds either alone or combined with other material may take up only a tiny fraction of the linear encoding's full range, effectively being 8 bit or even 4 bit. Calculate out the amplitudes of EACH HARMONIC of the REVERBERATION of a quiet sound in a 'live' room: you can't properly determine the ear's ability to pull information out of a sonic environment by hitting it with test tones on some godawful headphones or something. In the real world, people can and do pull information out of staggeringly low levels, and getting that wrong means it sounds lousy.
Vinyl more or less completely lacks the inharmonic distortion artifacts that quantized digital produces (note: DSD/SACD is different). Digital more or less completely lacks the extensive HARMONIC distortion that vinyl produces. The thing is, in double-blind testing you will have a very tough time picking out small amounts of low-order harmonic distortion, but small amounts of inharmonic distortion or correlated noise are dead easy to hear.
So, you get some people who may have particular sensitivities like pitch stability or harmonic distortion who loathe vinyl LPs (usually they've never heard a high-performance turntable), and you have some people who are sensitive to inharmonic distortion, and those are the ones saying CDs are thin, flat, shallow, 'soulless' etc. These are all forms of sonic damage produced by inharmonic artifacts at very low levels. Another interesting one is this: digital can produce DC outputs and handle test tones, but particularly when coupled with inadequate converters, the very slow pressure changes involved with such deep bass are impossible to track- so the bass is put into the air but it's not heard as such.
The poster you're replying to is in fact dead flat wrong, but not for the reasons you think he is:)
This is in effect a claim for a new evolutionary step- aggregate entities, aka corporations. It's more or less being claimed that human beings can't matter any more because the aggregate entities are so well resourced that they can starve, outmaneuver, and destroy any individual no matter how talented.
The reason given (or one of them) is that individuals are subject to things like harassing lawsuits and the inability to concentrate on the work of inventing due to distracting influences- which is to some extent self-fulfilling, because you are talking about demands placed on the individual by a governmental judiciary system that is equally available to individuals and aggregates.
It's a bit like spam: if aggregate entities can have (or evolve) parts (lawyers) solely to attack and cripple the progress of individuals, then this criticism of the 'lone inventor' becomes absolutely unanswerable: by definition it becomes impossible for an individual to stand against aggregates because it's far too simple to immobilize an individual with harassing lawsuits. The only hope for an individual in this situation is to be assimilated or to 'fly under the radar' doing things that may contribute to society but won't be identified as mass market 'inventions' and fought over.
We may be seeing just this sort of issue arise with Linux and Free Software in general: this type of cooperation among unrelated individuals flew under the radar for some time, and now Microsoft strongly wishes to destroy it, and has taken steps (shared source licensing) to outmaneuver it: it is possible that the only counter to this will be another sort of aggregation, the definition of an 'open source community' inclusively as its own aggregate, and the using of this to fight defensive actions. At the very least, it's become necessary to take on aggregate threat appraisal, as seen on places like Slashdot. If everyone had to make their own judgement call on things like Microsoft's viral shared source licensing, with not everybody equally able to identify dangerous legal points or refer them to a lawyer, how easy would it be to neutralize the entire Free Software movement and place it in a position of awful legal liability and vulnerability? It's been necessary to have a way to get the word out about such things, and this in itself is a form of aggregation.
I suppose the question to be asking is, what FORM of aggregation is needed? Something like Microsoft or Enron is only one form of aggregate entity. It doesn't have to be that way- in fact it could be just about any way imaginable, because these things are a combination of natural social forces (tempting to get into 'psychohistory' here!) and legal frameworks defining what such an aggregate is and what its goals, needs, defining qualities are.
This latter cannot be accepted as a fait accompli: the legal frameworks must be subject to re-appraisal in the event that we ended up defining an aggregate entity with about as much future as cancer. It's quite possible to define such a thing with self-destructive, unsustainable qualities, and to set it free and let it rage and burn out. And there's enough of that about: the next level needs to happen, now.
No. It doesn't. You can't beat Microsoft at its own game. The reason Linux scares Microsoft is because of the aspects that are NOT Microsoft's own game. Are they mounting jihad against coders of binary stuff for Linux? No, they are mounting jihad against the GPL- against mandatory cooperation and compulsory openness and the absence of things like seizing and exploiting intellectual property.
If you are not going to trust Microsoft's threat appraisal, what gives you the idea you're better qualified to gauge threats to them? Some vague notion that to beat them you have to act like them? They like that. It's their turf, and they'll bury anyone who tries to play that way.
That's for burn-to-order CDR-based discs. Glass mastered discs can't be pressed to order- they must be mass produced- but once they are, they very rapidly drop in cost, so long as the distribution mechanism is there to sell them.
Printing up one of something, even with modern computerised order fulfilment, isn't the same as firing up the presses and making 1000 of them.
It'll cost you around $1200 to get 1000 CDs replicated with 4/4 four-panel booklets, or about a buck and a quarter for all raw materials. You can do it for $850 if you can accept a slow turnaround and order 5000.
A sample bid for duplication at LOW volumes (in this case, 10) is $4.90 plus.20 for duplication plus $1.80 for that 4/4 four-panel booklet plus.35 for the jewel box: seven dollars and twenty-five cents.
Oh, come on. The engineering may be covered by the label in the recording budget that's set- that may or may not come out of the artist's share (see 'recoupable'). Same with the graphics. Offset printing almost certainly is paid for by the label. Goodies FOR THE ARTIST come out of the ARTIST'S share, are you kidding? Promotion, including paying off independent promoters in an auction-like payola scheme to get tunes played on radio and stocked in Wal-Mart, does in fact get paid for by the label.
I'm indie: see URL above. I worked with Ampcast to help them set up their CD program and I have a pretty good idea of how much CDs really cost physically. Mine go for $12: that is with a color four-panel two-sided insert, a color but one-sided tray liner, Red Book uncompressed CD master from high-resolution originals: in other words, very very near to major-label technical quality, and in some ways (sound quality) substantially better than the average major label release. And that is why I set my price so a couple bucks go to the artist, rather than setting it so that I get nothing.
It'll cost you about 8$ to 10$ per CD to run a business that sustains itself producing CDs that are like major label releases. If you're good with having no artwork, or God forbid 'CDs' burned off mp3s and the like, you should be able to bring them in for much cheaper than that.
Note, however, that the RIAA releases tend to be mass production- even 1000 is in its way mass production- and it sure as hell costs them less than $8 to cover everything involved. There's a lot of people gobbling caviar and Chateau Lafite in that business. Many are label people. Some are artists. For the artists, it means they will never see a royalty check so long as they live- but so long as they're allowed, they'll live high as if they were going to get paid. It's relatively cheap to give an artist a limo ride rather than pay them what you REALLY owe them, and if you own the limo company, hey- even cheaper. The whole industry is a big con.
Oh, c'mon- you can start an innovative business. It just can't be based on siding with ordinary citizens against an entrenched corporate interest. Not EVERYTHING innovative is identical with sticking it to Da Man.
I've been starting up a guitar effect box business and the products I'm making are loaded with innovation, up to and including the sheer minimalism of them, which demands matching innovation from the player (get the sound out of your fingers, not by twisting knobs and choosing presets). In this day and age with 'auto-tune' and Pro Tools, this approach is entirely innovative, plus it sounds a hell of a lot better. What it DOESN'T do is start an argument about intellectual property. You don't have to be pissing somebody off to be innovative:)
What I can't help but wonder is: to what extent are Microsoft prepared to play hardball with the US Government?
I'm picturing a line of patter something like this- imagine it delivered in a sort of Mafiosi tone:
"There's a problem- you see, we think there's a security hole in the software YOU use. It's very distressing. The trouble is, we just can't CONCENTRATE very well with this open source stuff around- how can we expect to pay people to fix security holes if you're going cut our legs out from under us like that? And gee, maybe we won't be ABLE to fix this suspected security hole unless you manage to reassure us by making a policy against any type of open source software. We're on YOUR side, now how can we work if you're not on ours?"
To what extent is Microsoft threatening the government? Lord knows they've been threatening the judiciary with all sorts of things. How deep does their treachery go? Would they give information about Windows backdoors to foreign intelligence to make good on a veiled threat? It would be really stupid to assume their interests coincide with the United States of America, so the government spooks and military decisionmakers had better do some risk analysis here.
"They are quite capable of losing millions of dollars, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the next five or ten years, or more."
No they are not. Microsoft's valuation is based on their making money, not losing it. Their other properties are not doing amazingly and they're having real, real trouble maintaining their rate of expansion. Since their valuation has Ponzi-like qualities, this is a serious problem. They'll be needing that supposed '40 billion' for stock buy-backs- and legal fees.
Hah, I read that BS 2.0 article too! I seriously, seriously wonder if that was a 'planted' article. In other words: Microsoft wrote it, got BS 2.0 to run it as if it was a real article. Why?
everyone that REALLY scares Microsoft is painted as total losers. AOL, Sony, et al
everyone who is actually held at gunpoint by MS and able to be liquidated is painted as heroes and examples that Microsoft can be beaten. RealNetworks, Apple, etc.
So if you buy into the spin, you believe that the real threats are not really threats- that AOL/TW will fail, Sony will fail, etc- and you believe in companies like Real and Apple as the 'real challengers' to Microsoft- companies that could be destroyed or marginalized slowly or quickly with just some seriously, blatantly anticompetitive action. "Microsoft feels Apple won't be around in 2003 so effective immediately all our Mac products are discontinued, and existing products will not work with Microsoft's replacement for the WWW which is being rolled out today". It's possible to knock either Apple or Real back a huge distance by being sufficiently evil and ruthless and hostile. That's not true for AOL and Sony- they're too big and involved in too many other things. Picture the nasty reports in Time and on TNT, in freaking People Magazine even, if Microsoft tried something like that on AOL/TW.
The BS 2.0 article was VERY WEIRD, and I am hugely curious as to what that was really about.
Assuming they can even afford to make XBox 2, what do you think the odds are that the SDKs for it will turn out games that work well on XBox 1?
Moot point, because XBox 2 is going to come out about the same time Dreamcast 2 comes out. But it gives you some idea about how much money and effort Microsoft is fruitlessly wasting...
Otherwise, they would be doing it instead of losing.
Any questions? Or do you figure Microsoft are nice guys and voluntarily lose every now and then because they didn't think of amazing unheard of ideas like 'give it away to kill the competitor'?
Again: they can't afford to do that. They need the money- and they're losing money- and the talk about their cash reserves is 'Enron'.
3.5" in diameter, 7.5" long, one pound eleven ounces and it produces 11 pounds of thrust. The page at SWB Turbines shows them in a 100-engine production run, having built all the turbine wheels and apparently machining everything out of aluminum bar stock as big as the engine- guess if you're charging $2400 an engine, you damned well machine the casing out of solid aluminum and not old soda pop cans;D
I sound like a PR flack, which I'm not- I've just long thought that the gas turbine is the best aircraft engine, and until yesterday I didn't know they made them this small. I mean, check out that 'Mamba' picture- how can you not think this is cool, that there's a working jet engine you can buy that fits in the palm of your hand, not an experiment but a commercial product with its own little market? Makes me want to start building F-15 models:)
Now all I want is for them to start building a high-bypass version of the SWB-100 with a free turbine powering a shaft to drive an intake fan... yes I know you could do that with an Allison or even a Garrett but that's so drastically overpowered for what I'm thinking of...
At least, not at the 'working and manufactured' level. What you need to be Googling for is [b]model aircraft turbines[/b], and that will get you both the sub-35-pound-thrust engines rated for model airplanes, and the larger ones for UAVs.
I was looking for this just the other day, and found the SWB Turbines site- it's so poorly made that I had to view source to check out the actual engine pages, but they've got from 11 pounds thrust to 107, at sizes and weights from 16" by 6.5" and 11 pounds (that's the 107 pound thrust one) down to this big! (no, NOT goatse...) There's also a picture of a 'Cri-Cri' microlight airplane powered by two SWB-100s instead of little piston engines. This is just one of the companies building tiny turbines- James Engineering Turbines builds a 30 lb thrust one (6.2 lbs weight) called the Cobra, and for actual generators you'd be googling for units like the Garrett GTP30... and for a big engine you'd be thinking in terms of an Allison 250-C18, at 317 HP at 6000 rpm of the output shaft. That's roughly a replacement for a V-8 engine, and smaller than a minivan- L 41" W 21" H 24", and 158 lbs.
How do I know? 'cos I spent hours yesterday redesigning airplane ideas in the sim 'X-Plane' and plugging in the new values to specify SWB-100 engines.
This is totally opposed to their DESIRE to pursue 'trustworthy computing' and bail out their tarnished image.
Those things are, however, long-term goals.
This action means a SHORT-term cash influx.
What I'm wondering is: could it be that Microsoft is having difficulty making payroll? X-Box is flopping, and what is the last major product release they've had? PC sales are not stellar either.
I realise the received wisdom is that they've got more money than God, but take just a moment to consider who that information is coming from: Microsoft itself, the same people who also say 'we'll be forced to make several million different versions of Windows', and 'this video will demonstrate to the Court that...'
Why do we suddenly believe them when they also say, 'Oh, and we have forty billion dollars. Isn't that cool?'?
Enron looked like a hell of a deal- until reality set in. How many billions of dollars did THEY say THEY had? And I don't think there's any evidence that Enron was LESS truthful than Microsoft.
Wouldn't it be interesting if Microsoft was secretly bankrupt?
Since when is it Apple's responsibility to sue them? Apple needs to make its iMacs bootable from CD-Rom. The CD has a functional purpose in the machine, it can't just be a music sandbox. I'd say, leave the iMacs unmolested unless you are proceeding to undertake a demonstration in court. But... proceed to undertake a demonstration in court. Class action under 'anti-hacker' statutes to prove that the (wealthy) record company is intentionally sabotaging people's property on a MASSIVE SCALE.
Whaddya want them to do- make the things work in iMacs?
Methinks you're gonna be putting the heat on the WRONG PEOPLE. These 'discs' not working in iMacs is GOOD. They are effectively viruses. The fact that they b0rk the iMac is just the finishing touch: it's an escalation of hostilities that might finally lead to the RIAA overstepping its boundaries in the eyes of the public.
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This is not an internal security issue, not even remotely. It is a foreign policy issue. And that is our most dangerous weakness as a country run by a leader who probably can't even spell 'foreign'. These guys make Kissinger look good- at least he was manipulative and evil from a position of understanding and study... Machiavellian, but there's something to be said for doing the homework. Without it, it's like trying to body-check oncoming traffic.
Of course, we now have banks sharing data outside of any government, for their own agendas. I can't even guess what will transpire from that- terrorists and suspected terrorists and other bad people, oh my! Color me impressed. No, color me good. Please? :P
News fucking flash, Einsteins: if you don't want people to copy your material?
STOP SELLING IT.
I'm not joking. Do you think X many people downloaded copies of the Spiderman movie because it was an artistic high-water-mark for filmic experience? How many people download copies of the best indie art films versus the worst Hollywood experiences in cynicism and lowest common denominator?
It's not even ABOUT the content. It's about the marketing. Some people seem to not even care what the hell they're producing- they'll tailor it to their crude notion of what 'everybody' will like, and then dump tons of money into marketing, trying to get everyone without taste to go 'duh, I'm gonna see that!' And they are surprised when people end up doing this in unauthorised ways?
I have a dream- perhaps it is an unrealistic dream, but it is my own- that one day, if I spend years of my life producing say a film or CD or something, and have no resources left for MARKETING, that it will go out there into a world where groups of people, innovative companies, Big Media outlets have taken on the role of scanning through all the Content people have produced all over the world. Not searching for unauthorized copies of overmarketed, cynical garbage, but searching for stuff that's GOOD. Finding ever-finer subgroups of people who'd think a certain thing was good. Finding ways to hook those people up to the other people in the world producing Content.
That I'll see a day when George Lucas goes on strike... and nobody notices.
Anyone with me? If you are: screw the mass market, find something you love and do it to within an inch of its life. The weirder, the more personal, the better. Be READY. Because we can't have this world until we give up being consumers and start being human beings, individuals, until we're ready to say 'you know, come to think of it most people WOULDN'T like this thing that I like, but I don't even care anymore'.
I do work with digital audio, design wordlength reduction, and I subjected myself to an ABX double blind test in which I attempted to tell the difference between 16 bit truncated audio and 16 bit dithered audio, using a dither specially chosen to produce the same amount of error energy (measured RMS) as truncation does. (TPDF actually produces 107% of the error energy of truncation, measured RMS! It's the added noise showing up)
This was exhausting. I only tried it once, because typically I have real work to do, not Usenet-style wanking and answering unending 'double blind challenges'. My peak performance was a run of eight correct identifications in a row- this was after two initial failures, giving a 94% chance I was hearing this difference up to that point. Then I stopped hearing it- I got tired, and frankly this is a level of detail that's easy to sense but not easy to pin down. You get a subtle coloring of everything with issues at that level, but if you try to concentrate on it you pick out larger-scale details and lose track, and stress will wipe you out right away.
Now, you are perfectly free to insist against all odds (well, insist with six percent chance you're right) that it was a fluke and I can't actually hear the difference between two different ways of reducing to 16 bit. I wouldn't dream of stopping you, and in fact I'd give high odds that YOU cannot do this: that's not your job.
However, if you think 'the human ear' can only tell differences up to 13 bits, you are crazy, or not even trying, or have a lousy ear, or have been reading things early digital apologists claimed without once questioning them. In fact, that claim is nonsense, the result of a long chain of unwarranted assumptions and generalizations. If you wrote code like that, it'd crash. Since it is merely an article of faith, you merely contradict obvious reality by claiming it...
CDs are WAY un-perfect. It's amazing how much work you have to do to get them even to the point of rivalling vinyl records, and we all know how flawed those are. CD flaws are totally orthoganal to vinyl records, and minimizing them involves totally different approaches- and you may simply have a totally tin ear for the flaws of digital. I know I have a tin ear for the flaws of analog- I can easily hear 'past' vinyl surface noise, for instance, and I know some people can't tune it out. I guess the difference between you and me is, when people claim they're sensitive to the pitch issues, surface noise issues, harmonic distortion issues of LPs, I believe them. It just doesn't bother ME. By contrast you're more or less insisting that because you can't hear the failings of digital, nobody else can. But they are not only there, they are about as far from 'real life' as vinyl records are- just in totally different ways.
I've been playing guitar, building gear, fooling with synthesizers etc. for years and years (see URL link), and after doing music on the Net for a little while, I stumbled across something unexpected. It was called 'Noise'. I went, "hey, really? I bet when I was a stoned teenager I did better 'noise' than that", and then I looked into it a little. And wow! One guy was putting wireless mics in a clothes dryer with bricks. Someone else had written a passionate statement of what NOISE, true NOISE really was. It was uncompromising- no beat, no melody, you had to be getting into producing a blast of brutal sound or you weren't Noise... and I realised, hey, that was part of MY musical background. There were other people into that. It didn't matter that any sane person would turn the result off with a spastic lunge at the 'OFF DEAR GOD TURN IT OFF' button. What mattered was, there were people who WANTED what I used to do with sound.
Result: Hard Vacuum. Knowing there were people who were hardcore fans, I took some of my gear (a three-band compressor I'd built and a shortwave radio) and, in just one long intense session, recorded a whole CD's worth of noise performances, making heavy use of shortwave interference, satellite noises and circuit disruption. For one of the tracks I pulled the plug on the equipment to stop it, resulting in a classic 'weeeeoooooooSNRK' dying electronics noise. It was great! I drew on all the twisted teenager delight in abrasive unmusical noise, combined with a lot of years of musical development telling me when to change it up, keep it moving, go for different effects and results.
That album has been one of my most successful albums. There's stuff I've done where I spent days laboring over detailed little sequenced parts or played until my fingers were blistered, that still hasn't been as popular as this crazed noise crap that was seemingly effortless and talentless.
Why is this? Because there are people for whom raw noise expresses their feelings, their selves- seemingly normal people whose inner 'music' is like RAARRRRRRSSSJJJKKKKKFFTTTTZZZZZBK and most people can't do that, not sincerely, not with understanding. You get people trying to do 'noise' by making little techno ditties using noises for beats, and it is like comparing a wolf with a poodle- somehow even insulting, you want to go 'do you even understand this?'. And with me, it's the wild breed of Noise in its purest form, and anyone into Noise instantly gets a hit off of that and instantly KNOWS 'yeah, this guy gets it'. And I keep meeting people like that. One guy wanted me to come out to do live gigs with him. You'd think there wouldn't be many people into this, but the ones that are, are seriously into it.
And that's what this 'lowercase' stuff is about. It's not the same genre (though I bet they'd understand my noise work, even if it's way too loud for them), but it's the same deal. If you don't like it, well congratulations, join the majority, and you forfeit any possible claim that you understand what's going on here. It's not being done for you. It's never gonna be done for you. If they wanted to make music for YOU, they'd be doing something completely different.
Lucas wanted 'Phantom Menace' scale from the beginning, but he couldn't have it. From space battles to interiors, his budget spelled out constraints on sets, on effects: Mos Eisley spaceport was like 20 feet of wall, Cloud City was several lengths of corridor, in-fighter reaction shots were restricted to extreme close-ups with little or no external views visible: the budget and the technology was hugely restrictive.
Through this limitation, Lucas produced BIG, CLEAR images that 'read' instantly, delivered the relevant story points without a single wasted visual element, and MOVED... both in the sense of a violent through-frame motion, and in terms of not lingering for a single wasted second over the effect as effect, but slamming past it to the next scene for a sense of headlong motion in terms of sheer film.
And all the time, he only wanted to make 'Ben Hur' with droids- pull the camera back, linger and ogle the worlds of his fantasy.
Well, now he can. And it sucks. And I'm taking good care of my old VHS tapes and pray they don't come to harm- because THAT was what made Lucas's legend. It's not what he wanted- that's boring. Cast of thousands, millions of worlds, billions of extras is boring. The synergy between this desire and the constraints of reality produced incredibly vivid, up-front, aggressive film, all because Lucas constantly wanted to cover up his failure to truly accomplish what HE wanted to see.
I hope there are 70mm (even 35mm) prints out there of the original films, being stored safely, because Lucas is the worst possible saboteur of his own filmed legacy- not through selling out, but through trying to realize the actually-boring ambitions he'd had from the start.
Vinyl is largely harmonic distortions, CD is largely inharmonic distortions. The latter are damaging at far lower levels than harmonic distortions, and have different effects on the sound. If you fry out a recording with a bunch of inharmonic distortion (example: realaudio) it doesn't matter if it can pass a 0hz-20K test tone, the fact is if you play a voice through it you'll lose everything in the way of emotive overtones and subtle sonic cues. The problem is more in the domain of resolution than frequency response.
Uh, no.
Digital audio can encode data down to zero hertz, and arguably is good enough going up to 22.050K. The area to watch is not frequency response, but resolution: in other words, dynamic range. This is why the greatest breakthroughs in digital sound quality have been with 24-bit digital and wordlength reduction, not upping the sampling rate. If you have 16 bit audio, quiet sounds either alone or combined with other material may take up only a tiny fraction of the linear encoding's full range, effectively being 8 bit or even 4 bit. Calculate out the amplitudes of EACH HARMONIC of the REVERBERATION of a quiet sound in a 'live' room: you can't properly determine the ear's ability to pull information out of a sonic environment by hitting it with test tones on some godawful headphones or something. In the real world, people can and do pull information out of staggeringly low levels, and getting that wrong means it sounds lousy.
Vinyl more or less completely lacks the inharmonic distortion artifacts that quantized digital produces (note: DSD/SACD is different). Digital more or less completely lacks the extensive HARMONIC distortion that vinyl produces. The thing is, in double-blind testing you will have a very tough time picking out small amounts of low-order harmonic distortion, but small amounts of inharmonic distortion or correlated noise are dead easy to hear.
So, you get some people who may have particular sensitivities like pitch stability or harmonic distortion who loathe vinyl LPs (usually they've never heard a high-performance turntable), and you have some people who are sensitive to inharmonic distortion, and those are the ones saying CDs are thin, flat, shallow, 'soulless' etc. These are all forms of sonic damage produced by inharmonic artifacts at very low levels. Another interesting one is this: digital can produce DC outputs and handle test tones, but particularly when coupled with inadequate converters, the very slow pressure changes involved with such deep bass are impossible to track- so the bass is put into the air but it's not heard as such.
The poster you're replying to is in fact dead flat wrong, but not for the reasons you think he is
The reason given (or one of them) is that individuals are subject to things like harassing lawsuits and the inability to concentrate on the work of inventing due to distracting influences- which is to some extent self-fulfilling, because you are talking about demands placed on the individual by a governmental judiciary system that is equally available to individuals and aggregates.
It's a bit like spam: if aggregate entities can have (or evolve) parts (lawyers) solely to attack and cripple the progress of individuals, then this criticism of the 'lone inventor' becomes absolutely unanswerable: by definition it becomes impossible for an individual to stand against aggregates because it's far too simple to immobilize an individual with harassing lawsuits. The only hope for an individual in this situation is to be assimilated or to 'fly under the radar' doing things that may contribute to society but won't be identified as mass market 'inventions' and fought over.
We may be seeing just this sort of issue arise with Linux and Free Software in general: this type of cooperation among unrelated individuals flew under the radar for some time, and now Microsoft strongly wishes to destroy it, and has taken steps (shared source licensing) to outmaneuver it: it is possible that the only counter to this will be another sort of aggregation, the definition of an 'open source community' inclusively as its own aggregate, and the using of this to fight defensive actions. At the very least, it's become necessary to take on aggregate threat appraisal, as seen on places like Slashdot. If everyone had to make their own judgement call on things like Microsoft's viral shared source licensing, with not everybody equally able to identify dangerous legal points or refer them to a lawyer, how easy would it be to neutralize the entire Free Software movement and place it in a position of awful legal liability and vulnerability? It's been necessary to have a way to get the word out about such things, and this in itself is a form of aggregation.
I suppose the question to be asking is, what FORM of aggregation is needed? Something like Microsoft or Enron is only one form of aggregate entity. It doesn't have to be that way- in fact it could be just about any way imaginable, because these things are a combination of natural social forces (tempting to get into 'psychohistory' here!) and legal frameworks defining what such an aggregate is and what its goals, needs, defining qualities are.
This latter cannot be accepted as a fait accompli: the legal frameworks must be subject to re-appraisal in the event that we ended up defining an aggregate entity with about as much future as cancer. It's quite possible to define such a thing with self-destructive, unsustainable qualities, and to set it free and let it rage and burn out. And there's enough of that about: the next level needs to happen, now.
If you are not going to trust Microsoft's threat appraisal, what gives you the idea you're better qualified to gauge threats to them? Some vague notion that to beat them you have to act like them? They like that. It's their turf, and they'll bury anyone who tries to play that way.
Does this cost money, or is it 'free'?
Here's the kicker: what are the licensing terms for this 'registration'? ...acceptance of the Microsoft 'shared source' license, perhaps?
That would be a _sweet_ boobytrap.
Printing up one of something, even with modern computerised order fulfilment, isn't the same as firing up the presses and making 1000 of them.
It'll cost you around $1200 to get 1000 CDs replicated with 4/4 four-panel booklets, or about a buck and a quarter for all raw materials. You can do it for $850 if you can accept a slow turnaround and order 5000.
A sample bid for duplication at LOW volumes (in this case, 10) is $4.90 plus .20 for duplication plus $1.80 for that 4/4 four-panel booklet plus .35 for the jewel box: seven dollars and twenty-five cents.
I'm indie: see URL above. I worked with Ampcast to help them set up their CD program and I have a pretty good idea of how much CDs really cost physically. Mine go for $12: that is with a color four-panel two-sided insert, a color but one-sided tray liner, Red Book uncompressed CD master from high-resolution originals: in other words, very very near to major-label technical quality, and in some ways (sound quality) substantially better than the average major label release. And that is why I set my price so a couple bucks go to the artist, rather than setting it so that I get nothing.
It'll cost you about 8$ to 10$ per CD to run a business that sustains itself producing CDs that are like major label releases. If you're good with having no artwork, or God forbid 'CDs' burned off mp3s and the like, you should be able to bring them in for much cheaper than that.
Note, however, that the RIAA releases tend to be mass production- even 1000 is in its way mass production- and it sure as hell costs them less than $8 to cover everything involved. There's a lot of people gobbling caviar and Chateau Lafite in that business. Many are label people. Some are artists. For the artists, it means they will never see a royalty check so long as they live- but so long as they're allowed, they'll live high as if they were going to get paid. It's relatively cheap to give an artist a limo ride rather than pay them what you REALLY owe them, and if you own the limo company, hey- even cheaper. The whole industry is a big con.
I've been starting up a guitar effect box business and the products I'm making are loaded with innovation, up to and including the sheer minimalism of them, which demands matching innovation from the player (get the sound out of your fingers, not by twisting knobs and choosing presets). In this day and age with 'auto-tune' and Pro Tools, this approach is entirely innovative, plus it sounds a hell of a lot better. What it DOESN'T do is start an argument about intellectual property. You don't have to be pissing somebody off to be innovative :)
-1, insufficiently ontopic ;)
I'm picturing a line of patter something like this- imagine it delivered in a sort of Mafiosi tone:
"There's a problem- you see, we think there's a security hole in the software YOU use. It's very distressing. The trouble is, we just can't CONCENTRATE very well with this open source stuff around- how can we expect to pay people to fix security holes if you're going cut our legs out from under us like that? And gee, maybe we won't be ABLE to fix this suspected security hole unless you manage to reassure us by making a policy against any type of open source software. We're on YOUR side, now how can we work if you're not on ours?"
To what extent is Microsoft threatening the government? Lord knows they've been threatening the judiciary with all sorts of things. How deep does their treachery go? Would they give information about Windows backdoors to foreign intelligence to make good on a veiled threat? It would be really stupid to assume their interests coincide with the United States of America, so the government spooks and military decisionmakers had better do some risk analysis here.
No they are not. Microsoft's valuation is based on their making money, not losing it. Their other properties are not doing amazingly and they're having real, real trouble maintaining their rate of expansion. Since their valuation has Ponzi-like qualities, this is a serious problem. They'll be needing that supposed '40 billion' for stock buy-backs- and legal fees.
So if you buy into the spin, you believe that the real threats are not really threats- that AOL/TW will fail, Sony will fail, etc- and you believe in companies like Real and Apple as the 'real challengers' to Microsoft- companies that could be destroyed or marginalized slowly or quickly with just some seriously, blatantly anticompetitive action. "Microsoft feels Apple won't be around in 2003 so effective immediately all our Mac products are discontinued, and existing products will not work with Microsoft's replacement for the WWW which is being rolled out today". It's possible to knock either Apple or Real back a huge distance by being sufficiently evil and ruthless and hostile. That's not true for AOL and Sony- they're too big and involved in too many other things. Picture the nasty reports in Time and on TNT, in freaking People Magazine even, if Microsoft tried something like that on AOL/TW.
The BS 2.0 article was VERY WEIRD, and I am hugely curious as to what that was really about.
Moot point, because XBox 2 is going to come out about the same time Dreamcast 2 comes out. But it gives you some idea about how much money and effort Microsoft is fruitlessly wasting...
Otherwise, they would be doing it instead of losing.
Any questions? Or do you figure Microsoft are nice guys and voluntarily lose every now and then because they didn't think of amazing unheard of ideas like 'give it away to kill the competitor'?
Again: they can't afford to do that. They need the money- and they're losing money- and the talk about their cash reserves is 'Enron'.
Oh, they'll be brought back to life, but with really serious issues, because they were in Heaaaaaa-ven... ;)
3.5" in diameter, 7.5" long, one pound eleven ounces and it produces 11 pounds of thrust. The page at SWB Turbines shows them in a 100-engine production run, having built all the turbine wheels and apparently machining everything out of aluminum bar stock as big as the engine- guess if you're charging $2400 an engine, you damned well machine the casing out of solid aluminum and not old soda pop cans ;D
I sound like a PR flack, which I'm not- I've just long thought that the gas turbine is the best aircraft engine, and until yesterday I didn't know they made them this small. I mean, check out that 'Mamba' picture- how can you not think this is cool, that there's a working jet engine you can buy that fits in the palm of your hand, not an experiment but a commercial product with its own little market? Makes me want to start building F-15 models :)
Now all I want is for them to start building a high-bypass version of the SWB-100 with a free turbine powering a shaft to drive an intake fan... yes I know you could do that with an Allison or even a Garrett but that's so drastically overpowered for what I'm thinking of...
At least, not at the 'working and manufactured' level. What you need to be Googling for is [b]model aircraft turbines[/b], and that will get you both the sub-35-pound-thrust engines rated for model airplanes, and the larger ones for UAVs.
I was looking for this just the other day, and found the SWB Turbines site- it's so poorly made that I had to view source to check out the actual engine pages, but they've got from 11 pounds thrust to 107, at sizes and weights from 16" by 6.5" and 11 pounds (that's the 107 pound thrust one) down to this big! (no, NOT goatse...) There's also a picture of a 'Cri-Cri' microlight airplane powered by two SWB-100s instead of little piston engines. This is just one of the companies building tiny turbines- James Engineering Turbines builds a 30 lb thrust one (6.2 lbs weight) called the Cobra, and for actual generators you'd be googling for units like the Garrett GTP30... and for a big engine you'd be thinking in terms of an Allison 250-C18, at 317 HP at 6000 rpm of the output shaft. That's roughly a replacement for a V-8 engine, and smaller than a minivan- L 41" W 21" H 24", and 158 lbs.
How do I know? 'cos I spent hours yesterday redesigning airplane ideas in the sim 'X-Plane' and plugging in the new values to specify SWB-100 engines.
Slashdot: home of GEEKS! :D
Those things are, however, long-term goals.
This action means a SHORT-term cash influx.
What I'm wondering is: could it be that Microsoft is having difficulty making payroll? X-Box is flopping, and what is the last major product release they've had? PC sales are not stellar either.
I realise the received wisdom is that they've got more money than God, but take just a moment to consider who that information is coming from: Microsoft itself, the same people who also say 'we'll be forced to make several million different versions of Windows', and 'this video will demonstrate to the Court that...'
Why do we suddenly believe them when they also say, 'Oh, and we have forty billion dollars. Isn't that cool?'?
Enron looked like a hell of a deal- until reality set in. How many billions of dollars did THEY say THEY had? And I don't think there's any evidence that Enron was LESS truthful than Microsoft.
Wouldn't it be interesting if Microsoft was secretly bankrupt?
We are talking about the music industry.
Thus, "monetizing" means "not paying" :)
Since when is it Apple's responsibility to sue them? Apple needs to make its iMacs bootable from CD-Rom. The CD has a functional purpose in the machine, it can't just be a music sandbox. I'd say, leave the iMacs unmolested unless you are proceeding to undertake a demonstration in court. But... proceed to undertake a demonstration in court. Class action under 'anti-hacker' statutes to prove that the (wealthy) record company is intentionally sabotaging people's property on a MASSIVE SCALE.
Methinks you're gonna be putting the heat on the WRONG PEOPLE. These 'discs' not working in iMacs is GOOD. They are effectively viruses. The fact that they b0rk the iMac is just the finishing touch: it's an escalation of hostilities that might finally lead to the RIAA overstepping its boundaries in the eyes of the public.