Hmmm, you have a point. I'd like to suggest that perhaps it's not about the 'huge commercial entity' part either- whether it's a monopoly doing it or not is irrelevant. It is the _context_ of the modification. This draws a distinction between your ad-stripping example and Smart Tags, in that the ad stripping is on the reader end and is a refusal to 'read the page' the way the content provider is supplying it. With Smart Tags, the context is that of a _third_ _party_ interfering with the attempt to provide content to the reader (who can strip or not or even SwedishChefify for all it matters). The situation of a third party getting in between and changing things is significantly different from simply having a reader going 'I want to strip ads! I choose to strip ads, therefore although I _expect_ this content provider to want to put ads in, I'm not going to honor that'. The third party means the reader can be fooled into believing the intent of the content provider is different than it is- but more than that, it's granting the third party a 'right' to alter and change things that really only the reader is entitled to.
I bet I know what he was going on about. Mark my words.
He's reacting to the many, many poor 16-bit CDs out there. You can take CD a surprisingly long way if you dither it really well but there's lots out there which is completely screwed-up: lots of truncation all through the recording process, inadequate bus wordlength, you name it.
Peoples' ears are trained by what they listen to. You live out in the country, you listen to nature sounds off in the distance, and your ear learns to discriminate between different types of distant sound automatically. There's no effort, you just do.
If you listen to a lot of _bad_ CDs, your ear is being trained to pull detail out of a lot of _garbage_: if audio can be said to have a fractal quality (like, oh, everything _else_ in nature?), bad digital recording obliterates this. At the threshold of hearing (actually well before that point for really bad examples) instead of pulling signal out of the noise floor as your ear is constantly trying to do, you are pulling the correlated noise known as quantization distortion out of the noise floor. There _is_ no consistent signal pattern to be had. The signal leaves off right there- at all frequencies, too, this is NOT a frequency domain problem. It's a resolution problem, a quantization problem.
Dithering _really_ helps this. Dithering properly at every single stage of digital transform makes a world of difference. That said, I am not convinced Levinson isn't right: though it makes a difference, I question whether it is a real solution. I think it's sort of damage control.
In one sense he's wrong- we're constantly surrounded with acoustic sound. You may not be getting a healthy sound for audio-brain-center auditory training from bad _CDs_ or any CDs... but all the time, you're getting an optimal sound from passing cars on the highway, and the road crews tearing up the asphalt:) maybe Levinson leads too sheltered a life if his brain only gets CD digital sound to process! He should get a teenage rock drummer kid to move in next door, then his ears would be getting normal healthy acoustic sound to process, whether he likes it or not >:)
I'll concede this: not every tube amplifier or peculiar high end speaker is at all suitable for mastering. Those monster horns are like audio microscopes: it's a selective view of the audio spectrum, not practical to work with. But really- maybe _you_ can work on Yamaha NS-10s but that doesn't mean everybody can and should. Once you have to deal with serious mastering concerns you have got to go a LOT more 'audiophile' or you will simply lose: your stuff won't be consistent, won't translate well to all systems.
Different strokes. You keep mixing, and others will deal with the fine-tuning (and pray that you _are_ using NS-10s vs., say, Genelecs: some Genelecs are so 'forgiving' that you can be mixing in horrible bass and treble irregularities and not even hear it. NS-10s at least distort when you do that:) )
For the last 10 or so years, I've been wondering if that all is complete bullshit:)
It got covered by the Absolute Sound magazine. I've written for that magazine, and the _promise_ of the thing sounds very appealing. And yet the guy would not explain what he did, and I just couldn't accept that... I would _love_ to plug a weird device into my studio power strip that would 'polarize' all the electrons or whatever and clean out the soundstage plus also making my TV look better. The TAS guys apparently had experiences like: played system. HP and some golden ear types were in the other room. Install 'clock', keep playing. About 15 minutes later, HP _and_ golden ear types, unaware of the installing, are clamoring into the room demanding "What did you DO?" because the character of the sound underwent an obvious change that they heard from the other room. And yet Tice won't explain what the hell he's doing, if anything... plus, the TAS guys, um, like their herbaceous sustenance;)
Very frustrating. Now that I think about it in the context of Slashdot, this is an argument for open source _science_. The more people do stuff and conceal it, the less good it all is. This Tice may actually have come up with something for all we know- but prove it! There is nothing, nothing but hearsay...
Don't be misled. He may not be able to hear 18 kilohertz... but there is MORE TO IT than just the highest pitched test-tone you can hear.
Recent work on dithering has illustrated that with good dithering you can get audible signal to something like 12db _below_ the noise floor, which was previously (early digital) thought to be a hard limit. This explains much about the vinylphiles... more significantly, it means that people also have the capacity to develop great sensitivity to issues of _linearity_ which is what dithering is for in the first place. Linearity is not a pitch-domain thing. It's a resolution-domain thing. You could have someone listening to a 200 hz tone and be able to distinguish when it 'swelled' to 1.00000001 of its previous volume, even if they couldn't hear above 8K. In fact, some types of hearing loss _increase_ sensitivity to resolution issues, though they do so in an un-helpful manner (recruitment- your response to volume boost is no longer as linear).
There's no reason to doubt that when you're 71 your ears will still be as sensitive to resolution-domain stuff. You may be a total loss in the frequency domain, though:)
Yeah! A man after my own heart (though I could spend _hours_ nitpicking about details like the vents on everything, but I'll be tolerant since this is Slashdot and nobody cares:) )
He's Right You Know! Geekery is _fun_ to apply to audio. In the spirit of Ogerman's post here's what I've done- copy amend tweak etc to your heart's content...
old harman/kardan integrated with really beefy power supply, hacked into so the signal path goes basically straight to the power section- none of the elaborate tone controls and buttons remain, just input switching, volume and a balance trimmer
four foot tower speakers that are constantly riding the front edge of a wave of tweakiness- bass cone area exceeding that of a 15" due to use of four different sized speakers series-parallel like it was a Marshall guitar cab. 12/10/8/6.5 means averaging of narrow response irregularities. Really works nice. No vents, but a large variovent on the back of the cab.
Envy of that monster Sonotube sub;) but I get obvious SPL at 20hz too, just not in the area of 117db. Mine aren't designed for rock-concert levels.
No surrounds- stereo guy here.
Cable made from telephone cable found on a mountainside- big spool, garden-hose multipair. Basically, just lots of strands of solid-core run in parallel, each separately insulated. Works great! Heavy gauge is nice but I always hold out for insulated strands. By the same token:
Interconnects made from _telephone_ cable. Four wires loose in an oversized black plastic jacket, shielded with aluminum foil tape, with a 12-gauge zipcord ground. The signal wires will actually rattle around in the cable- minuses, electrostatic noise (use this as a guitar cord with heavy distortion and you can hear it like it was a microphone! Had to make other kinds for that purpose), pluses- literally air dielectric _and_ 100% shielding, and _cheap_ for what you get. I've also heard of people using Radio Shack wire-wrap cable, which is apparently OFC with silver plating and Kynar- though they tend to also use just the one hairlike wire, which seems kinda wimpy to me;)
Bike inner tubes floating speakers and turntable for isolation mounts- a terrific mod for very cheap, I really enjoyed this one. Did a simultaneous A/B when I first tried it: one speaker normal, one floating. It really altered the sound quite a bit! I tried it and got to really like it.
No line conditioner, but I did throw a big powerline choke on the amp AC power, and on all the synths and effects in my studio rack:)
I have to concur. High end is not about money. It's about _tweaking_ _the_ _gear_, and any overclocker or kernel hacker should appreciate the fun of that:)
Pretty fucked up considering you need to dither digital audio to make it warm, not insert stupid noises:)
By the way, I bet if you hid the EQ, compander, and noise gate the audiophile wouldn't have hassled you;) come on, what are you, post-production? It'd probably sound better without that stuff, honest. Though the guy's response is a BIT harsh, what if you enjoy twiddling knobs a whole bunch? Different strokes:)
Re:just my random incoherient $.02 worth
on
Insanely Audiophile
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· Score: 2
Well, bear in mind the guy with the tubes and horns was going with a vinyl analog record, NOT a CD. In fact, I'd almost be willing to bet he was putting on the 'six eye' Columbia pressing of "Time Out", which was very popular. Reading that made me go 'Aha- I have that one' and so I put it on to accompany slashdotting, and yeah- it _is_ nice. Paul Desmond's sax playing is _really_ smooth, and it's surprising how good the bass is (been doing work on the bass end of my studio monitors- I have _professional_ need of a high performance system, I do digital mastering). Though- a horn system like that simply can't compare to direct-radiating sealed box woofers for low end extension, so the guy may have never noticed the way Time Out really only has nice midbass:)
Come on, folks- this stuff is FUN! How can you enjoy stuff like PCs and overclocking and not sympathise a little bit with this audio stuff? It's the same kind of thing! It's stereo system hot-rods and NOT only confined to white-smocked technicians making million dollar patchcords for rich idiots.
Example: all that stuff about magnets? Old news and well discussed at rec.audio.high-end, where there's always an argument but _also_ usually some clued-in people as well. And the thing is- magnets have compliance as well. This is no different from air suspensions- it still has a compliance and a pattern of varying compliance with different amounts of separation. If you want to play with that sort of thing, you can do it for virtually nothing- all you need to do is go get some bike inner tubes. Put 'em under your speakers with the stems tucked out where you can get at 'em. Presto, isolation stand- really works. Using high pressure (stiffer compliance) seems to bring everything forward and make it aggressive- I have no idea why, but can confirm others' reports of that. Really soggy compliance minimizes this- the real fun is tuning the air pressure like it is a 'forwardness' control. Good cheap fun. And isn't that a good thing? About time audio quality went 'open source'.
That is a good thing to keep an eye out for. Good thought- in fact, I'm not sure if you could even consider that illegal. OSS _invites_ interaction, that's the point. You'd have to draw a line between malice and incompetence, which I think is a lot trickier than drawing a line between proprietary and publically available.
Possible counterattack would be that any such action could be seen as proof that 'wreckers' are actively working with OSS code- and therefore capable of violating the license agreements and stealing code for proprietary purposes. One of the most important defenses against this has been existing policies at many companies that employees are NOT ALLOWED to look at OSS code for fear of just such accusations.
Re:"same treaty process that gave us the DMCA dept
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Harm From The Hague
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· Score: 3
Ah, but with this Hague treaty it can become more of a way of life...;)
"The site I work for is a Medical School. It is dangerous and wrong for non-medical profesionals to augment medical information and insert their own agenda (ie links to comercial sites or confilicting information) into our content. They can get their own damn host and acreditation if they want to make a medical statement. And the same could be said for other professions."
Woo! somebody who is less of a damn blabbermouth than I am please mod this poster UP! Talk about insightful (or interesting- no, I think 'they can get their own damn accreditation' is just flat insightful)!
_Stripping_ ads is very different from _adding_ ads. The whole context is totally different. Some guy could download one of my pages (or anybody's) and fool around with it as much as he wanted, make all the links point to goatse.cx, whatever, and it wouldn't matter. Having a huge commercial entity develop the capacity to place commercial advertising on EVERY page without paying for it DOES matter. It's completely different from the case of an individual web browser choosing to strip ads, or make everything sound like the Swedish Chef. Advertising is a commercial medium with monetary value.
It's sort of like compulsory licensing in music. I can see arguing that global compulsory advertising should not be done in this way. But if compulsory advertising IS done, it's insane to not pay content owners a royalty for use of their words. If Microsoft wishes me to link to their site, they could get me to use banner ads and BUY a banner ad: they could get me to run text-format web advertising and buy a text link at a cheaper price because it is less intrusive. If they want a link right in the MIDDLE of my content, they should pay MORE because it is more intrusive and hence more valuable.
But if some Linux geek went, "I've just invented this thing! It lets me make unpaid commercial advertising links out of the very text of any web site- even Microsoft's! Why, they pay all the costs for providing the content that my invention turns into ad links to me, and I don't have to pay them anything!", every content creator on the web and his dog would sue the guy into next week and we'd _never_ hear from him again.
We would not either think this was a great idea if some Linux geek was doing it. We might think it was less potentially harmful because nobody would use it, but it'd be the same thing: unpaid commercial advertising actually made out of the content itself (can't get much more intrusive than that!). As such, it's a neat-ish idea- IF they pay me for use of my words. They are obliged to do so if they want to advertise on my content. If they just want links all over, they can put 'em on the window frame of the browser, which they own. They can't use _my_ words for it. Advertising should be paid for.
Of all the things you mention, the only one particularly analogous is Third Voice, and even that is not completely analogous. Third Voice is a parallel note-sticking technology. Smart Links is ubitiquous unpaid commercial advertising in a VERY intrusive way.
Web advertising costs money. None of the things you mention are anything like web advertising. If Microsoft wishes to place web advertising on every page in the world, they should be ready to pay a royalty to all those people for the commercial use of their content as advertising. It's no different if it's opt-in: they're still using other people's content as outright web advertising without payment. They need to come up with some form of royalty to compensate the content holders- particularly because, UNLIKE Third Voice, the advertising is directed by a central controlling authority, not just random commentary by web users.
Of course it is unlawful! Nobody gave Microsoft any sort of right to place unpaid advertising on every freaking page on the Web- even as a 'switchable' option. They have web pages of their own: they can place links there. They have the damn _browser_, they can place little buttons all along the window frame if that pleases them. They don't have rights to make COMMERCIAL ADVERTISING USE of the content on the web, unless they enter an agreement with content providers. Nothing you mention is commercial advertising. Do you propose that Microsoft be given television and radio advertising for free, too?
Of course. This is just advertising! All the same rules apply as if it was banner ads. The only difference is, Microsoft intends to not pay anybody no matter how much advertising they place on your page. There's no other difference- text-only web advertising even already exists. Actually, this _ought_ to pay higher royalties than that as it is more intrusive.
Not footnotes in the usual sense. Unpaid advertising from an entirely different publisher.
What justification is there for allowing this? There's not even the pretense of paying for this commercial use of your content! Not even opt-in makes sense. Opt-in and paying content providers a royalty for use of their words as tags would make sense. I daresay it would not pay as much as selling banner ad space, but you _can_ buy text-only web advertising. How is this different from text-only web advertising, and what possible justification could there be for not paying page-authors a royalty for use of their words as commercial advertising?
Perhaps it should be _more_ of a royalty because this is even more intrusive than those new huge web ads. It's no longer even a case of routing content _around_ an enormous animated GIF. In this case the advertisement IS the word being read, and you can't read the content without reading the word. Thus, the royalty paid should be proportionally higher, because it is the last word in intrusiveness.
If you want tags to Microsoft sites in your content, why don't you just _write_ them in? You have that capability. The technology is available;)
It doesn't even make sense as opt-in. Let's say your house has a big front wall. I'd like to make it a billboard, because my neighbors drive past your place.
Opt-out means I paint stuff on your house, and then neighbors can choose not to look.
Opt-in means I can ask the neigbors, "Hey, do you mind if I paint a billboard on Maloi's house?"
The trouble is, if people WANT to link to Microsoft sites in their HTML, they can just do so- nothing is stopping them. The idea that you should even set a meta tag and turn on 'smart tags' is stupid- what kind of sense does it make to have a monopolistic commercial entity PLACING COMMERCIAL CONTENT LINKS all over your page and not paying you? This is advertising, pure and simple. It is ludicrous to not see it in an advertising content. Given that, what is the justification for Microsoft not paying for the advertising? Much less, being allowed to advertise on EVERYONE'S page by default!
If they're allowed to do this, I should be allowed to go add links to my stuff on THEIR homepage, and links to rebuttals on all their FUD pages without asking them. Hell, I should be allowed to go paint my company logo on their buildings in Redmond while I'm at it.
If they're allowed to use opt-in meta tags, I should be allowed to ask my friend Craig if HE minds if I add links to rebuttals on all Microsoft's pages and paint my logo on their buildings.
"Hey, Craig, do you mind if I stick my logos all over Microsoft's property?"
"Nah, go for it."
*dum de dum de dum* Gotta love the new rules! Where's my paint? My friend Craig opted in to letting me put logos on Microsoft's property, so off I go. I think I'll ask him if I can paint the White House pink, next.
Yes. Exactly. Microsoft's monopoly position and ability to entirely control this feature IS the problem.
That said, what do you propose to do about it?
I wonder if the antitrust appeals court is being kept up to date on all this? It certainly is awfully contemptuous behavior. Absolutely justifies anything and everything Judge Jackson said about them. The question is, will Microsoft in doing this piss off even the appeals court?
In doing so they are for one, playing brinksmanship and taking NO effort at all to prepare for a loss, which means the breakup would be more catastrophic rather than less- and in addition, they are stepping over the line with regular people who use their products, killing off functionality and blatantly setting up tollbooths and preparing to milk people for all they're worth. This is not appealing to the consumer. In fact, Microsoft 'taking over' the web by putting their own tags in, is not appealing to the consumer per se, only confusing and perhaps intimidating. You no longer know who you're dealing with. This is damaging popular support for Microsoft. Who ever heard of a ZDnet 'report' on a MS technology zinging 'em that savagely? If they are losing even their lapdogs they must have lost consumers _long_ ago.
I know my take on copyright law (I record music) is that I distinguish between noncommercial and commercial uses. I reserve all commercial rights, but I openly encourage noncommercial copying. If someone wants to noncommercially play my music through a goofy EQ filter, of course they may. If, on the other hand, someone defaces it in that way and tries to SELL the result.. they are up a creek, because I have protections against that sort of abuse, being copyright holder.
By the same token, if someone doesn't like one of my links and, say, paints White-Out on the screen to conceal it, more power to 'em. But if Microsoft decides IT wishes to link my words to ITS interpretation of what it wants those words to relate to, it is making commercial use of my stuff on a large scale, period. I'll repeat that- it is making commercial use of my stuff. It's USING the material I put on the web, to try to place ITS paid links everywhere you look. It is advertising heavily and intrusively on my page without paying me a damned cent! There is absolutely no justification for this.
When they turn around and begin placing links to MY site, my music or whatever, all over THEIR pages without charging me a penny, then I will consider the idea that this is a service. You'll note they are not offering THAT. I can only wonder just how much it's gonna cost to get access to this technology. In theory, I could end up having to pay large sums of money to Microsoft in order to get 'rights' to certain words that they are going to grab out of my pages, without asking, and link to. It's an extortion racket- another sort of 'namespace', but this time it is literally the English language being seized and monetized. If this goes through, I will not have the capacity to clearly and unambiguously express my views on the Web even though I PAY for web hosting that will in theory allow me to put up what I want. The 'receiving end' is being compromised for commercial gain, and I don't even get a kickback.
"No problemo. From now on, they'll charge $29 in US, $45 in Europe, while BillDaCat gets a special price of $95."
You know... he could swear up and down that he has no problem with that, and insist that they keep charging him $95, and it still won't make it inherently right. It would only illustrate who he sides with.
You will _not_ necessarily get a economic-libertarian-randroid type to acknowledge they're being unreasonable by throwing extreme cases at 'em. They will simply annoy you by fanatically insisting that they don't have any rights to fairness either, and that if they WANTED to, they could become the MPAA too (presumably by working through weekends and holidays! o_O ).
The only real argument you have is the argument that going with the most utterly pure form of free-market laissez-faire is NOT beneficial to society- that it goes out of balance. There's tons of evidence for this (sometimes softened by the vestiges of regulation and control, like with the California power grid), but you're not dealing with someone who places a value on society, typically you're dealing with someone whose only concern is 'can I be one of the winners?'.
If that's what you're up against, you can't win the argument, and you just have to over-rule them and shut them up. Talking of fairness only makes sense in a context where there is a society to be protected, and not everybody wishes society to exist. Some people want no rules and the death of the weak... which is a recipe for species extinction as the species charges into a local maximum, kills off all its diversity, and then croaks when conditions change and the finely optimised uber-people can no longer adapt because they're too inbred to what worked _last_ century.
Yes, this is an unusual way to look at it- your point?
And, _through_ looking at it that way, the reason they can't charge whatever the fuck they want is because it's bad for society for the biggest ass-kickers to be TOO efficient. We already have a somewhat limited set of choices for entertainment in the sense of 'movies to watch'. You're not gonna see big variety at your local movie house. The discriminatory pricing is only _part_ of a _pattern_ that also involves squeezing out other choices and dominating the public awareness completely. The more money they have to do that, the better they'll do it. Give them less money, they will be less able to do it- and that becomes a social good, allowing more options to arise over the long term, and take over from the MPAA if they really start to produce sucky products.
THAT is why they can't charge whatever they want. Not because they couldn't get away with it- because they could, and are, and in so doing they finance ever more expansion, past what is socially useful.
Of course, the EU just wants to get its DVDs cheaper;) but this is why they should be _allowed_ to when the MPAA can successfully pull off cartel/monopoly pricing.
Slashdot Mirror
2002: It's the ..er.. Pentium III rev2! Kniht. Eww. Oy...
But I'm one of the Mac slashdotters so.. um.. nevermind :)
Hmmm, you have a point. I'd like to suggest that perhaps it's not about the 'huge commercial entity' part either- whether it's a monopoly doing it or not is irrelevant. It is the _context_ of the modification. This draws a distinction between your ad-stripping example and Smart Tags, in that the ad stripping is on the reader end and is a refusal to 'read the page' the way the content provider is supplying it. With Smart Tags, the context is that of a _third_ _party_ interfering with the attempt to provide content to the reader (who can strip or not or even SwedishChefify for all it matters). The situation of a third party getting in between and changing things is significantly different from simply having a reader going 'I want to strip ads! I choose to strip ads, therefore although I _expect_ this content provider to want to put ads in, I'm not going to honor that'. The third party means the reader can be fooled into believing the intent of the content provider is different than it is- but more than that, it's granting the third party a 'right' to alter and change things that really only the reader is entitled to.
He's reacting to the many, many poor 16-bit CDs out there. You can take CD a surprisingly long way if you dither it really well but there's lots out there which is completely screwed-up: lots of truncation all through the recording process, inadequate bus wordlength, you name it.
Peoples' ears are trained by what they listen to. You live out in the country, you listen to nature sounds off in the distance, and your ear learns to discriminate between different types of distant sound automatically. There's no effort, you just do.
If you listen to a lot of _bad_ CDs, your ear is being trained to pull detail out of a lot of _garbage_: if audio can be said to have a fractal quality (like, oh, everything _else_ in nature?), bad digital recording obliterates this. At the threshold of hearing (actually well before that point for really bad examples) instead of pulling signal out of the noise floor as your ear is constantly trying to do, you are pulling the correlated noise known as quantization distortion out of the noise floor. There _is_ no consistent signal pattern to be had. The signal leaves off right there- at all frequencies, too, this is NOT a frequency domain problem. It's a resolution problem, a quantization problem.
Dithering _really_ helps this. Dithering properly at every single stage of digital transform makes a world of difference. That said, I am not convinced Levinson isn't right: though it makes a difference, I question whether it is a real solution. I think it's sort of damage control.
In one sense he's wrong- we're constantly surrounded with acoustic sound. You may not be getting a healthy sound for audio-brain-center auditory training from bad _CDs_ or any CDs... but all the time, you're getting an optimal sound from passing cars on the highway, and the road crews tearing up the asphalt :) maybe Levinson leads too sheltered a life if his brain only gets CD digital sound to process! He should get a teenage rock drummer kid to move in next door, then his ears would be getting normal healthy acoustic sound to process, whether he likes it or not >:)
That's why you need us mastering engineers ;)
I'll concede this: not every tube amplifier or peculiar high end speaker is at all suitable for mastering. Those monster horns are like audio microscopes: it's a selective view of the audio spectrum, not practical to work with. But really- maybe _you_ can work on Yamaha NS-10s but that doesn't mean everybody can and should. Once you have to deal with serious mastering concerns you have got to go a LOT more 'audiophile' or you will simply lose: your stuff won't be consistent, won't translate well to all systems.
Different strokes. You keep mixing, and others will deal with the fine-tuning (and pray that you _are_ using NS-10s vs., say, Genelecs: some Genelecs are so 'forgiving' that you can be mixing in horrible bass and treble irregularities and not even hear it. NS-10s at least distort when you do that :) )
It got covered by the Absolute Sound magazine. I've written for that magazine, and the _promise_ of the thing sounds very appealing. And yet the guy would not explain what he did, and I just couldn't accept that... I would _love_ to plug a weird device into my studio power strip that would 'polarize' all the electrons or whatever and clean out the soundstage plus also making my TV look better. The TAS guys apparently had experiences like: played system. HP and some golden ear types were in the other room. Install 'clock', keep playing. About 15 minutes later, HP _and_ golden ear types, unaware of the installing, are clamoring into the room demanding "What did you DO?" because the character of the sound underwent an obvious change that they heard from the other room. And yet Tice won't explain what the hell he's doing, if anything... plus, the TAS guys, um, like their herbaceous sustenance ;)
Very frustrating. Now that I think about it in the context of Slashdot, this is an argument for open source _science_. The more people do stuff and conceal it, the less good it all is. This Tice may actually have come up with something for all we know- but prove it! There is nothing, nothing but hearsay...
Recent work on dithering has illustrated that with good dithering you can get audible signal to something like 12db _below_ the noise floor, which was previously (early digital) thought to be a hard limit. This explains much about the vinylphiles... more significantly, it means that people also have the capacity to develop great sensitivity to issues of _linearity_ which is what dithering is for in the first place. Linearity is not a pitch-domain thing. It's a resolution-domain thing. You could have someone listening to a 200 hz tone and be able to distinguish when it 'swelled' to 1.00000001 of its previous volume, even if they couldn't hear above 8K. In fact, some types of hearing loss _increase_ sensitivity to resolution issues, though they do so in an un-helpful manner (recruitment- your response to volume boost is no longer as linear).
There's no reason to doubt that when you're 71 your ears will still be as sensitive to resolution-domain stuff. You may be a total loss in the frequency domain, though :)
He's Right You Know! Geekery is _fun_ to apply to audio. In the spirit of Ogerman's post here's what I've done- copy amend tweak etc to your heart's content...
I have to concur. High end is not about money. It's about _tweaking_ _the_ _gear_, and any overclocker or kernel hacker should appreciate the fun of that
By the way, I bet if you hid the EQ, compander, and noise gate the audiophile wouldn't have hassled you ;) come on, what are you, post-production? It'd probably sound better without that stuff, honest. Though the guy's response is a BIT harsh, what if you enjoy twiddling knobs a whole bunch? Different strokes :)
Come on, folks- this stuff is FUN! How can you enjoy stuff like PCs and overclocking and not sympathise a little bit with this audio stuff? It's the same kind of thing! It's stereo system hot-rods and NOT only confined to white-smocked technicians making million dollar patchcords for rich idiots.
Example: all that stuff about magnets? Old news and well discussed at rec.audio.high-end, where there's always an argument but _also_ usually some clued-in people as well. And the thing is- magnets have compliance as well. This is no different from air suspensions- it still has a compliance and a pattern of varying compliance with different amounts of separation. If you want to play with that sort of thing, you can do it for virtually nothing- all you need to do is go get some bike inner tubes. Put 'em under your speakers with the stems tucked out where you can get at 'em. Presto, isolation stand- really works. Using high pressure (stiffer compliance) seems to bring everything forward and make it aggressive- I have no idea why, but can confirm others' reports of that. Really soggy compliance minimizes this- the real fun is tuning the air pressure like it is a 'forwardness' control. Good cheap fun. And isn't that a good thing? About time audio quality went 'open source'.
Possible counterattack would be that any such action could be seen as proof that 'wreckers' are actively working with OSS code- and therefore capable of violating the license agreements and stealing code for proprietary purposes. One of the most important defenses against this has been existing policies at many companies that employees are NOT ALLOWED to look at OSS code for fear of just such accusations.
Ah, but with this Hague treaty it can become more of a way of life... ;)
Woo! somebody who is less of a damn blabbermouth than I am please mod this poster UP! Talk about insightful (or interesting- no, I think 'they can get their own damn accreditation' is just flat insightful)!
It's sort of like compulsory licensing in music. I can see arguing that global compulsory advertising should not be done in this way. But if compulsory advertising IS done, it's insane to not pay content owners a royalty for use of their words. If Microsoft wishes me to link to their site, they could get me to use banner ads and BUY a banner ad: they could get me to run text-format web advertising and buy a text link at a cheaper price because it is less intrusive. If they want a link right in the MIDDLE of my content, they should pay MORE because it is more intrusive and hence more valuable.
We would not either think this was a great idea if some Linux geek was doing it. We might think it was less potentially harmful because nobody would use it, but it'd be the same thing: unpaid commercial advertising actually made out of the content itself (can't get much more intrusive than that!). As such, it's a neat-ish idea- IF they pay me for use of my words. They are obliged to do so if they want to advertise on my content. If they just want links all over, they can put 'em on the window frame of the browser, which they own. They can't use _my_ words for it. Advertising should be paid for.
Of all the things you mention, the only one particularly analogous is Third Voice, and even that is not completely analogous. Third Voice is a parallel note-sticking technology. Smart Links is ubitiquous unpaid commercial advertising in a VERY intrusive way.
Web advertising costs money. None of the things you mention are anything like web advertising. If Microsoft wishes to place web advertising on every page in the world, they should be ready to pay a royalty to all those people for the commercial use of their content as advertising. It's no different if it's opt-in: they're still using other people's content as outright web advertising without payment. They need to come up with some form of royalty to compensate the content holders- particularly because, UNLIKE Third Voice, the advertising is directed by a central controlling authority, not just random commentary by web users.
Of course it is unlawful! Nobody gave Microsoft any sort of right to place unpaid advertising on every freaking page on the Web- even as a 'switchable' option. They have web pages of their own: they can place links there. They have the damn _browser_, they can place little buttons all along the window frame if that pleases them. They don't have rights to make COMMERCIAL ADVERTISING USE of the content on the web, unless they enter an agreement with content providers. Nothing you mention is commercial advertising. Do you propose that Microsoft be given television and radio advertising for free, too?
Of course. This is just advertising! All the same rules apply as if it was banner ads. The only difference is, Microsoft intends to not pay anybody no matter how much advertising they place on your page. There's no other difference- text-only web advertising even already exists. Actually, this _ought_ to pay higher royalties than that as it is more intrusive.
If you want to add commercial links to words on the web content that I PAY TO HOST, I think you should pay me.
Period.
Write your own damn content if you want advertising links ;)
Not footnotes in the usual sense. Unpaid advertising from an entirely different publisher.
What justification is there for allowing this? There's not even the pretense of paying for this commercial use of your content! Not even opt-in makes sense. Opt-in and paying content providers a royalty for use of their words as tags would make sense. I daresay it would not pay as much as selling banner ad space, but you _can_ buy text-only web advertising. How is this different from text-only web advertising, and what possible justification could there be for not paying page-authors a royalty for use of their words as commercial advertising?
Perhaps it should be _more_ of a royalty because this is even more intrusive than those new huge web ads. It's no longer even a case of routing content _around_ an enormous animated GIF. In this case the advertisement IS the word being read, and you can't read the content without reading the word. Thus, the royalty paid should be proportionally higher, because it is the last word in intrusiveness.
It doesn't even make sense as opt-in. Let's say your house has a big front wall. I'd like to make it a billboard, because my neighbors drive past your place.
Opt-out means I paint stuff on your house, and then neighbors can choose not to look.
Opt-in means I can ask the neigbors, "Hey, do you mind if I paint a billboard on Maloi's house?"
How is their opinion relevant?
If they're allowed to do this, I should be allowed to go add links to my stuff on THEIR homepage, and links to rebuttals on all their FUD pages without asking them. Hell, I should be allowed to go paint my company logo on their buildings in Redmond while I'm at it.
If they're allowed to use opt-in meta tags, I should be allowed to ask my friend Craig if HE minds if I add links to rebuttals on all Microsoft's pages and paint my logo on their buildings.
"Hey, Craig, do you mind if I stick my logos all over Microsoft's property?"
"Nah, go for it."
*dum de dum de dum* Gotta love the new rules! Where's my paint? My friend Craig opted in to letting me put logos on Microsoft's property, so off I go. I think I'll ask him if I can paint the White House pink, next.
That said, what do you propose to do about it?
I wonder if the antitrust appeals court is being kept up to date on all this? It certainly is awfully contemptuous behavior. Absolutely justifies anything and everything Judge Jackson said about them. The question is, will Microsoft in doing this piss off even the appeals court?
In doing so they are for one, playing brinksmanship and taking NO effort at all to prepare for a loss, which means the breakup would be more catastrophic rather than less- and in addition, they are stepping over the line with regular people who use their products, killing off functionality and blatantly setting up tollbooths and preparing to milk people for all they're worth. This is not appealing to the consumer. In fact, Microsoft 'taking over' the web by putting their own tags in, is not appealing to the consumer per se, only confusing and perhaps intimidating. You no longer know who you're dealing with. This is damaging popular support for Microsoft. Who ever heard of a ZDnet 'report' on a MS technology zinging 'em that savagely? If they are losing even their lapdogs they must have lost consumers _long_ ago.
I know my take on copyright law (I record music) is that I distinguish between noncommercial and commercial uses. I reserve all commercial rights, but I openly encourage noncommercial copying. If someone wants to noncommercially play my music through a goofy EQ filter, of course they may. If, on the other hand, someone defaces it in that way and tries to SELL the result.. they are up a creek, because I have protections against that sort of abuse, being copyright holder.
By the same token, if someone doesn't like one of my links and, say, paints White-Out on the screen to conceal it, more power to 'em. But if Microsoft decides IT wishes to link my words to ITS interpretation of what it wants those words to relate to, it is making commercial use of my stuff on a large scale, period. I'll repeat that- it is making commercial use of my stuff. It's USING the material I put on the web, to try to place ITS paid links everywhere you look. It is advertising heavily and intrusively on my page without paying me a damned cent! There is absolutely no justification for this.
When they turn around and begin placing links to MY site, my music or whatever, all over THEIR pages without charging me a penny, then I will consider the idea that this is a service. You'll note they are not offering THAT. I can only wonder just how much it's gonna cost to get access to this technology. In theory, I could end up having to pay large sums of money to Microsoft in order to get 'rights' to certain words that they are going to grab out of my pages, without asking, and link to. It's an extortion racket- another sort of 'namespace', but this time it is literally the English language being seized and monetized. If this goes through, I will not have the capacity to clearly and unambiguously express my views on the Web even though I PAY for web hosting that will in theory allow me to put up what I want. The 'receiving end' is being compromised for commercial gain, and I don't even get a kickback.
Ham on wry, if I'm any judge ;)
Put down that chisel! There is _not_ either an eleventh commandment that sayeth, "Sucks to be you"! ;)
You know... he could swear up and down that he has no problem with that, and insist that they keep charging him $95, and it still won't make it inherently right. It would only illustrate who he sides with.
You will _not_ necessarily get a economic-libertarian-randroid type to acknowledge they're being unreasonable by throwing extreme cases at 'em. They will simply annoy you by fanatically insisting that they don't have any rights to fairness either, and that if they WANTED to, they could become the MPAA too (presumably by working through weekends and holidays! o_O ).
The only real argument you have is the argument that going with the most utterly pure form of free-market laissez-faire is NOT beneficial to society- that it goes out of balance. There's tons of evidence for this (sometimes softened by the vestiges of regulation and control, like with the California power grid), but you're not dealing with someone who places a value on society, typically you're dealing with someone whose only concern is 'can I be one of the winners?'.
If that's what you're up against, you can't win the argument, and you just have to over-rule them and shut them up. Talking of fairness only makes sense in a context where there is a society to be protected, and not everybody wishes society to exist. Some people want no rules and the death of the weak... which is a recipe for species extinction as the species charges into a local maximum, kills off all its diversity, and then croaks when conditions change and the finely optimised uber-people can no longer adapt because they're too inbred to what worked _last_ century.
Yes, this is an unusual way to look at it- your point?
And, _through_ looking at it that way, the reason they can't charge whatever the fuck they want is because it's bad for society for the biggest ass-kickers to be TOO efficient. We already have a somewhat limited set of choices for entertainment in the sense of 'movies to watch'. You're not gonna see big variety at your local movie house. The discriminatory pricing is only _part_ of a _pattern_ that also involves squeezing out other choices and dominating the public awareness completely. The more money they have to do that, the better they'll do it. Give them less money, they will be less able to do it- and that becomes a social good, allowing more options to arise over the long term, and take over from the MPAA if they really start to produce sucky products.
THAT is why they can't charge whatever they want. Not because they couldn't get away with it- because they could, and are, and in so doing they finance ever more expansion, past what is socially useful.
Of course, the EU just wants to get its DVDs cheaper ;) but this is why they should be _allowed_ to when the MPAA can successfully pull off cartel/monopoly pricing.