It's a peculiar sort of mindset that insists, "This $600 CD has the same value as this $600 computer!" when a buck's worth of plastic and cyanine dye can perfectly duplicate the former, and it'd take years of labor and piles of electronic parts to perfectly duplicate the latter- if you even could, I don't think I could build computer PC boards from scratch.
God help us when we manage to invent the Star Trek Replicator: owning one will be punishable by death. So you want to use it to replicate soup to feed your family? NO SOUP FOR YOU!:P
"Stop rationalizing and start respecting intellectual property. It is becoming increasingly important as more and more people's labor results in nothing but intellectual property. Not treating intellectual property with respect similar to that accorded physical property undermines the future. The more we respect intellectual property, the more of it will be available for us to enjoy and use at reasonable prices."
This is _seriously_ debatable. You are overstating things ridiculously. IP is not _alienable_: as the distribution costs drop to next to nothing, the inherent value of IP drops as well. In the future, IP as such will mean nothing. What IP says about what you are able to create will mean everything. It will be a 'record club' world where, just like RIAA 'record clubs', you get nothing whatsoever out of the distribution of your IP (you _are_ aware the artists get nothing from those?) except for the publicity in an increasingly competitive battle for people's attention.
Furthermore, it's astonishing to see anyone on this side of the year 2000 blithely state that "The more we respect intellectual property, the more of it will be available for us to enjoy and use at reasonable prices". Have you been paying any attention at all to the increasingly crazy world of patents and IP rights? It is absolutely self-evident that there is a limit to how much we should respect intellectual property. We may disagree on where that limit is, but to suggest that 'more respect' is always better is astonishing and deeply questionable. In effect, it completely discounts the idea of social benefit and a public domain. This is unacceptable thinking.
Before you characterise Napster as handguns and copying as theft, you had better look at record clubs, promotion, and ask yourself how much the record company pays to proliferate and publicise musicians through those means, versus how much (0$) the record company pays to have listeners swapping tunes over Napster while paying the bill for the networking themselves.
If you object that the record company controls the former and does not get to control the latter... then you're getting very close to the real issue... but also close to the long history of record company involvement with the Mafia and organized crime, in exerting this control over radio and other media. You see, it's not necessarily a good thing to have that kind of control...
This is an interesting point. Is there a case for permitting/encouraging MS to go absolutely as far as it can, bundling everything, disallowing third party apps and having you pay by the minute?
How bad would MS have to get in order to _force_ adoption of alternatives like OSX and Linux, and given that this approach would continue to give them power and money, how do you stop them from just buying Apple and having legislation passed making Linux illegal?
Maybe we're better off muddling through with the antitrust legislation and _not_ giving MS enough rope to hang itself. That is making a big assumption- that it won't first strangle everyone else in the world with that rope, before hanging itself.
There is no reason in the world Microsoft cannot expand into being the only effective source of information, network connectivity, communications, and identification services.
That means you would no longer have a social security number- privatizing would mean you'd have a Microsoft number, and without it you could not buy anything, drive, or vote. This is not unthinkable- look at it as an outsourcing of existing governmental functions.
Damn straight. I can barely code, compared to a lot of people, but I wrote software to do high-quality dithering from 24 bit to 16 bit for CD mastering. Plus, I've added a lot of tweaks to it- and I kluged together AIFF reading routines, came up with several groundbreaking dither algorithms based on quadratic and primitive root residues, and made it GPLed in hopes other audio hackers can use the code.
You can't bitch about not having code because other people don't really owe you anything. I develop 'Mastering Tools' at my own pace to suit my own needs. The point is, through _developing_ free software I make it possible for other people to develop other things, offshoots in which the hard work is done. I don't think anyone without a mastering-grade studio could have tuned the dithers I've written- you need specialised monitoring to do that. But now anyone can make a simple little app that just sticks a different GUI on it, or uses some of the dither routines for, say, a game in which it's important that distant footsteps _sound_ distant, in which depth cues are actually well handled instead of sound blaster crap. This is the way the world works- or should work.
And if nobody re-uses my GPLed routines, that's fine too- I wrote them for _me_ and have already got my investment in time back many times over, in the effectiveness and quality of my new CD mastering processes.
...because I came up with a concept based on text-mode xterms. This was inspired by the number of terms I've seen that allow you to zoom to larger or smaller fonts- with a term, the enclosing window gets bigger or smaller as well. The whole thing could be rigged to be a _flat_ 3D environment- you'd zoom stuff away from you to keep tabs on it in the background.
As far as I know, it only makes sense to do that with terms- but I enjoyed it so much I thought it'd make a pretty nifty GUI. The term-only GUI:D
I use the GPL, and am going to continue to use it.
I stand to gain more from acknowledgement of what my software does than from metering and selling the software itself.
I have the _right_ to set my own terms on my own property. It is _their_ rules that so rigorously define my code as my property. I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep if it was as free as air. _They_ are the ones who put such incredible weight on my right to dictate terms and conditions by which my work can be used.
Because of this, my right to use whatever the hell terms I want is almost absolute- and if I choose to contribute to the pool of GPLed free software, they have no business bitching about it.
How true. A little example from real life- just last night I was reading a Hunter S. Thompson book ("Better Than Sex") in which he mentions Mencken's brutal obituary of William Jennings Bryan.
One google search got me a few quotes from the obit.
One more google search with keywords from the quote got me the full text of this famous, scandalous, and essentially truthful obituary, and I read and enjoyed it.
We are living in an age where any schoolchild could do the same. The slightest curiosity about such a thing (and some good search-engine instincts) can open up a vast, immeasurable expanse of culture. Who would go to the library to try and dig this article out of microfilms? But who wouldn't do two quick Google searches to satisfy their curiosity- and come away with a better historical perspective, and a little bit wiser about humanity itself?
My only remaining question is: why would it not be just as proper and valid to be able to do such a search for Roseanne Barr's famously bad singing of the Star Spangled Banner- or a clip of Geraldo being attacked by skinheads on television- or the "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" scene of Apocalypse Now?
The struggle of the Internet is a struggle of public access to culture. The fact that some of the culture is instant, and is still being treated as a product, is irrelevant. In a hundred years, it will all be the background noise of history... unless, of course, we want to make culture and history against the law, or meter it so you can only afford to ingest a tiny bit of the culture you're immersed in.
And that will be difficult... as difficult as establishing secure mass media formats... because not everyone will, or should, submit meekly to such rules.
I don't think it will take much in the way of publicizing. Felten's deftly managed to give the EFF and the television news the most deadly 'sound bite' they could have:
"RIAA crushes scientific research in Ivy League academia"
The best part is, the USA _does_ have a sort of class system- ask any preppie, ask Dubya's dad. You don't mess with the Ivy League colleges that have produced a disproportionate number of Washington bigshots. You'd have to mess with USC to make deadlier, more-organised enemies- and frankly, the Ivy League plays better in Peoria. Say the names 'Princeton-Harvard-Yale-etc' and an awful lot of people will just kowtow automatically- and say 'RIAA is doing damage to Princeton's academic freedom!' and the same people will bristle, even if they don't fully understand the details.
And the RIAA _did_ try to damage Princeton's academic freedom. They can't weasel out of this, courts don't put much stock in 'we didn't really mean it, honest'. The RIAA _did_ treat Princeton academia as a target to beat into submission. It's on record and public knowledge- and they succeeded, so it's easy for them to say they didn't mean it, now that they got what they wanted.
If you want to use this situation to best advantage, lean on the class angle- that it wasn't some punk in a dingy room surviving on Jolt, but an Ivy League College that was _successfully_ beaten into submission. People would like to think the poshest colleges of the USA are still ivory towers, and threatening and dominating these institutions is REALLY bad PR.
I think that the way it'll work out in practice is that Marylanders will use the software anyhow- it's just that in doing so, they will legally be 'scofflaws'. Microsoft will encourage people in Maryland to use their software without addressing the licensing problems, so that rather than Marylanders having legal recourse (shyeah right- but anyway) for problems with the software, the Marylanders will be subject at any time to prosecution for violating UCITA.
So if you are a Microsoft user in Maryland, you have to be _extra_ good or Microsoft can sue your ass! O_O
"Does that mean that companies are authorised to leave a back-door in a program you sell that allows them to essentially hack into your computer at any time to disable a piece of software they sold you?!?"
How else? Seriously, I don't see why not. The only other alternative is to have the software demand to phone home over the net, which is possibly a more popular method and used in Windows XP and.NET. In that case, rather than the company being authorised to hack into your computer, the company is authorised to sell you products that will intentionally cease to work if you don't keep checking in with the central authorities.
Where have you been, to not know this? Microsoft does this. Other companies do as well. I know that I (a Mac user) returned the mp3 player Macast for a refund because it continually lost its (paid for) registration and demanded to 'phone home' to confirm the legit number I gave it, eventually refusing to honor the number because I'd moved the app to different hard disks too many times.
This isn't the future- it's the past and present. Probably the best response is to continue to be ready to ask for your money back when your software turns out to operate this way, and/or just plain do without stuff that works this way. It's potentially quite a bit more intrusive than government.
I think this situation has more or less repeated throughout history. It's kind of like how the younger generation always seems dumber, cruder, a scandal (from ancient Greece to the Revolutionary War to the current day). Power _always_ seems to be destroying the world. Look again in ten years and power will _still_ seem to be about to destroy the world- but won't have got that much farther than it is.
The corporations, the power, are one part of that equation. You are another part, just by venting and holding the opinions you do. You're representative of a lot of people.
In particular I always find it amusing when people decide that, just because politicians are corrupt and bribed, that they will STAY bribed. That's a naive view. You've just got to make it a real political hot potato to carry out the will of the corporate 'government', and the reality will continue to be an uncomfortable balance between the various interests involved.
This assumes that you can sue a large corporation. Whatever gives you that idea?
I support the Canadian lawyer's position (isn't this called 'Tort Reform'?) because I'm more or less resigned to the idea that I cannot sue a big corporation for anything. If I'm lucky, another big corporation might sue it- for instance, if it stole ideas of mine and tried to prohibit anyone else from using them, I certainly can't do anything about it but some other corporation that wished to use the ideas might choose to go to court.
The main thing is, these Big Corporations (tm) are obviously developing a real _zeal_ for suing individuals, college professors, magazines, EVERYBODY. It's not even about whether I can sue a big corp and win (not!) it's about whether the corp basically gets to legally destroy the life of anyone it feels like destroying, through legal action.
This process makes government and legal system the private police of the corporation, to be used punitively and subject to no limitation but mere whim: and we already have this situation. Ask the SDMI researchers, the subject of this very article.
It would be an awfully small concession, to give up the purely hypothetical capability to 'sue a corporation' in order to force them to drop the tactic of legal action as a financial and pragmatic club. If you really think you're on an equal footing under the law when bringing suit against a corporation- try it. Your money will run out before you accomplish anything.
This is cool, I love to see it, I love the EFF... but... there are some very serious flaws with this arrangement.
It's not so much the fact that Sony or BMG or whoever could grab whatever they liked and flood the market with it giving only credit (and sure, you can undersell them and go 'mine is the official version!' but think for a second about what your distribution network is like, versus what theirs is like)... to some, this would be problem enough, but there are musicians out there who'd accept such a bargain hoping to trade off their hoped-for popularity...
No, the real booby-trap is what I call the 'Singing Munchkin' problem. Basically, if you use this license, you are not simply giving blanket permission to other musicians to work with your music (arguably a good thing, if they're not Puffy), you're also giving, say, Burger King permission to take your music and overdub singing munchkins singing "Whopper whopper yummy whopper yum yum whopper mmm mmm good!" to YOUR MELODY.
This is deadly. (and not just to listener's sanity)
The fact is, you can compose music, write melodies all you want, but when you marry words to them it fixes the melody forever in the listener's mind by providing verbal 'chunks' that are associated with the tune forever. To this day I still associate "Hall Of The Mountain King" with the words "We are all in seventh grade, seventh grade, seventh grade, we are all in seventh grade in Diamond Junior High" thanks to an evil bitch of a music teacher. This is a _horrible_ potential problem.
It's only worsened by the plain and simple fact that if _anything_ really good gets out under (O) licensing, the next move would be for advertising services to pop up that monitor all that content, know some clever audio hacks with Pro Tools and connections with background vocalists, and to set up very competitive commercial music supply based on this source of unencumbered original music- and the ease of editing, remixing and overdubbing onto that stuff. Normal commercial music costs quite a lot by comparison. This 'open music' would drastically change the market for commercial music. What's a little line of original author credit? Nobody reads those when they appear in TV commercials. You might as well have it say 'Original Author sold separately' for all the difference it would make.
Personally, I am going to continue to put "all commercial rights reserved- noncommercial copying OKAY" on all my CDs.
If people want to put stuff on Napster, I'd gladly testify that I consider that noncommercial copying. If people want to put on singing munchkins without my permission and make an ad, surprise! That is COMMERCIAL use and if they want to play that game they have to play by the OLD rules which give me a certain amount of leverage if I don't sign it away. And if someone wants to rip a few bars of rhythm section to use under their rap song or whatever, and they're another artist- for Christ's sake, why not ASK ME? I could fairly easily do a separate mix of just the rhythm section for pretty much anything you want, tailor the mix to the new purpose, _collaborate_ rather than act like some passive victim of copyright violation. All this license nonsense really obscures the fact that some musicians are more than happy to work with others. If you are an artist and want a few bars of my song, don't invent new licenses that would give you permission ahead of time, ASK. You are not alone, you are part of a community if you allow it to happen...
One of my geekiest friends used to run a computer fix-it shop, at which I worked doing Mac repairs. He now teaches people in classes like that, which he likes better. Among the classes he gives is the A+ cert. Once I went to check out his classroom and the funky network he put together to get all the PCs, which he built himself from parts, to talk to each other. For fun, we took the A+ equivalency test- I'm a Mac geek and he had never studied the course because he didn't have to, only had to run the programs for the students.
We both would have passed the A+ cert without any studying whatsoever.
We also both thought it was a terribly ridiculous sort of cert to have, if a Mac geek could pass it just by guessing cleverly and knowing what some of the answers _weren't_. I actually beat out my friend the PC tech occasionally:)
In order for the watermark to persist through the mp3ing process, it must be at a high enough amplitude to not be discarded as irrelevant.
The watermark is not musical information- it's heard as buzzing flies, or some other audible sound, and must also be smack in the middle of perceptible sounds to not be discarded by psychoacoustic algorithms (that discard plenty of perceivable sound, as well).
As such, it becomes part of the noise floor of the track. Correlated or uncorrelated, it is not part of the musical signal. And again, it must be strong enough to stand up to the most low-fi mp3 encoding (typically 128K, possibly 96K?)
Has anyone taken the time to measure watermarked audio or calculated from watermark levels to produce a figure for the real signal-to-noise ratio for such a medium? *VBG*
Let's get ready to spread the word on that one. It's just as fair as the way CDs were spun to be better than LPs by use of signal-to-noise ratio figures. Hell, records have better sound than bad mp3s- it's totally legitimate to say at this point that watermarked DVD-A will have substantially worse signal-to-noise ratio than vinyl records, and it is a plausible claim. Naturally, audio CDs will _really_ stomp watermarked DVD-A for signal-to-noise ratio...
The truth, of course, is that you can hear past a noise floor to a certain extent- this is what helps vinyl records, and why dithering is so important for digital audio. This doesn't help the watermarking side much as that's still an annoying type of sound by design, right in the most sensitive hearing band- but it's basically true. However, conventional wisdom is that the noise floor is a hard limit- and this can be turned around as a deadly attack on watermarked media's superiority. Somebody come up with what the signal-to-noise ratio is (including correlated noise) for the worst mp3 you can come up with, like Xing 128K or something. We'll get the word out that watermarked stuff by definition must have a signal-to-noise ratio that is worse even than that...
Why? I've _written_ for TAS, and I can tell you that this is so far out of line that it doesn't even merit serious consideration. The degree of distortion is at least 6db worse than the very worst, most unlistenable, most soundstage-collapsing quantization distortion the ordinary CD can possibly have. We are not talking audiophile-grade distortions here, like differences between dithers. We're talking 'partially blown speaker' levels of distortion. I flat guarantee to you that HP would stand about 0.5 second of it before getting up and physically leaving the room.
Which is to say- don't hold your breath. Did you think these things _need_ a TAS to discern them? You'll be able to hear it quite easily on a boombox- or through a Xing mp3 at 128K. That's the _point_.
Absolutely. In addition, commercial music is increasingly compromised anyhow by compression and limiting wars that have labels trying to out-loud each other, to the point that artists literally cannot get even good-sounding CDs out there, and mastering engineers cannot avoid smashing everything to the maximum possible constant loudness and distortedness unless they wish to be effectively blackballed and get no more major label business. This goes for the artists and mastering engineers who hate it, too.
It's said that the Verance watermark sounds like middle-distance buzzing bees at a higher pitch (buzzing flies?). Which may, in a sick way, be compensated for by the fact that, with the hypercompression techniques in use, there _is_ no middle distance for commercial music anymore- everything is brutally up-front and flattened, and there are no quiet passages that are not compressed to full volume, and loud passages are routinely distorted to the point of flat-topped waves, so this covers up the other sonic ugliness of the buzzing flies sound.
So, the commercial sphere is going to mean extremely high resolution media containing totally smashed and flattened audio of relentless, ear-fatiguing aggressiveness, which contains in the background a noise of buzzing flies or some other uncorrelated noise at least 6 DB louder than the current worst possible CD-audio quantization noise, or to look at it another way, a noise of buzzing flies or some other such extraneous sound that is always louder than the worst distortion components produced by mp3 encoders such as Xing.
I couldn't make this up if I tried... and it's appalling, but it also offers an opportunity.
There are places out there gearing up to give indie musicians the capacity to do music distribution without going through a label. Largest is the rip-off mp3.com, which only lets you sell CDs made from 128K (inadequate) mp3s. Of course, by definition this is still less distortion than DVD-A with watermarks... however, there's others, and the one I'm most a fan of is ampcast.com, which is just finishing up their own CD program, with the option to have CDs duped from Red Book master CDRs you supply to Ampcast: burn-to-order of _real_ CDs. (Burning from special 256K and up mp3s not available for download is also an option.)
The thing is, there's an extra thing Ampcast is doing- they are taking pains to allow the artists to tap into the existing distribution networks. You can buy an official barcode for your CD through them for $20 a barcode- and get them shrinkwrapped with spine stickers, everything you'd want to have your stuff alongside commercial releases and look just the same as them.
The catch is- maybe you don't _want_ your indie stuff to fight its way into that channel. You can always sell it over the net, after all, and go for alternative distribution- and more relevantly, there was a time when the stuff with barcodes _sounded_ _better_ than what people could do in their garages. But that time is gone! These days, not only is electronic, computer-generated music more popular, but the facilities for producing commercial-quality music have never been more affordable- and at the same time, the people producing the commercial music are increasingly _wrecking_ it with compression and blatant overlimiting (so you could do just as well, sonically, with Pro Tools, or better if you chose), but they are also preparing to add uncorrelated noise many times as bad as the noise of clean old vinyl records (or the quantization noise of the very worst CD transfers), _intended_ to be worse than the worst an mp3 encoder can do!
So in a way, the logical thing would be to run screaming- to abandon even the idea of sharing the same shelves with that crap, and try to establish a sort of underground that would most likely be centered on CDs done right. CDs done right (with recent improvements in dither technology) are surprisingly good, even compared to high end analog media. And we can be absolutely sure that the record industry will never produce anything as good as CDs done right again (barring a total collapse and recalibration of their values). The one-two punch of volume wars and watermarks will keep them totally pinned, hopelessly committed to debilitating and selfish practices that ruin their reputation for professional sound quality...
Absolutely. It's a two-edged sword, but you've definitely described how it'd be used by the RIAA et al. The question to ask is, will the technology also be given to the consumer- i.e. do you get the right to grab a snippet of song, go somewhere and be told what it is even if it is not an RIAA-affiliated act? Do you have any right to do this type of analysis at all? Or is it to be withheld from consumers to preserve the existing methods by which an album gets heard?
How hard will it be for an indie or a producer of free digital music to include their works in the database- and more importantly, is there going to be support for an opt _in_ list on things like Napster: like "This fingerprint HAS permission to be involved in noncommercial copying, to any extent"? I'm wondering if the whole technology will be hijacked so you in practice cannot both have your fingerprints on file, and cooperate with services like Napster. Your submitting prints of your stuff will automatically cause them to be thrown off all forms of fair-use file sharing, but you don't get paid anything out of the taxes collected and given to the RIAA. Sort of worst of both worlds.
Answer: you don't. You can't mix free commando guerrila development and marketing with the spend big money people. It's a guaranteed way to lose totally.
I would ask, has anyone at Eazel heard of the terms 'cash flow' or 'break even point'? If all they know is 'burn rate' they're in big, big trouble... and if their mental picture of a business is Apple, they're absolutely fscked. Apple is neat, Apple is great, Apple has been an amazing place to work for many people, but Apple is a Fortune 500 company monster corporation that has long been able to throw a million dollars at this and that just in case it produces technology that might turn Mac users on. Jobs kickstarted this, by having Apple pay for backrubs and freshly squeezed orange juice for the first Macintosh creators (work 18 hours a day, but in an atmosphere of elitism, luxury and insecurity- worked pretty well) and then when he was canned, they forgot about the insecurity part and Apple people got used to working with basically unlimited resources. When Jobs returned he brought insecurity back to Apple and killed a lot of projects and scared people into producing like mad again- result, iMac, the cube, lots of good and bad products that were less boring.
But the common factor is that Apple people don't really think in terms of budget. They produce neat stuff but this is not the background you want, if you expect to manage a small business and have it survive- and all free and open-source projects more closely resemble small business than big business. It's about not running out of cash, managing your expenditures so you can keep going on a month-by-month basis. If you've got yourself into a position where you're going, "Unless we land this big investment we will run out of cash next month!" you have already lost. Go turn into a 501c3 nonprofit and s/investment/contribution/.
Eighty-seven _trillion_ dollars of money was exchanged in international foreign exchange electronic transactions.
That's not last year, or this year- that was back in 1986. Before the 70s, it was like one or two trillion a year, and then it started to snowball. Finance is by far the biggest customer of communications networks.
Taking out the world's financial networks for a second would impede $2 grand worth of transactions. A minute of downtime a year would be $165K- an hour, nine million dollars. And that is from the 1986 figures- more than a decade ago. Any guesses on how much of the world's financial transactions go over the net now?
It's true. Or to be more accurate- the world's finances could be sabotaged in this way quite easily. The weird thing is, it's already taking damage just from stuff like Microsoft's irresponsibility- you don't have to have a malicious geek with a trenchcoat to cause billions of dollars of financial damages. Your software vendor can do you that kind of damage without even thinking, charge you for it, and then go set you up for even more.
That's only the case if you are trying to apply tweeter elements to a very uncontrolled woofer element, using high-order crossovers.
In order to do composite drivers, you have to go with simpler crossovers, not more complex- phase relationships have to be dead simple, the normal rules for multi-element speakers are entirely reversed.
Electrostatics and planars do what they do not just by having the speaker handle all frequencies with one element, but by having the element behave more controllably than cone drivers. Use of very light elements can mean little or no overshoot or ringing at bass frequencies. That ringing is what would really create 'doppler' effects on the sound- having the speaker follow the path of the waveform as one unit does not cause any sort of distortion in itself.
The roll-up piezo speakers are likely to be fairly crappy sound, but this is mostly because they're lacking in any sort of solid stand or base to push against, and the piezo operates by flexing and going convex or concave. Clamp the edges and you'll get more bass and general fidelity.
Maggies aren't electrostatic. They're driven by a linear voice coil along the surface of the stretched mylar. There's also Sumo Aria/Museatex Melior, which are _center_ driven mylar: normal voice coil, no speaker cone, and the coil attaches to the mylar which remains flexible (unlike electrostatics, the film doesn't move in a planar way- it moves through ripples from the driving point)
I've experimented with these fairly extensively, and still am from time to time. DIYing center-driven stretched-mylar speakers is fun, but tricky to make useful. Here's what I learned:
Resonance is not your friend. All these speakers have to control resonances somehow, and it's a tricky problem. Resonant notes will fart and honk, usually in the bass, and blatantly ruin the sound.
They're incredibly wide-range at _any_ size, but the max output volume is size-dependent and very limited. This type of speaker just doesn't want to go loud, but even small ones will try real hard to put out strong bass. Quite weird really. This is, I think, specific to the point-driven or line-driven ones, not electrostatics or piezos.
Dispersion is stunning, and contributes to the sense of not-loudness. You can stick your ear in one and it's very subdued volume. Then you go to the other side of the room and there's no falloff in volume. It's the ultimate 'mellow party' speaker in that there's no place that gets 'blasted' by the speaker, not even right in front of it.
Dispersion is amazingly wide-range. The highs are very extended, even far off-axis.
If you make cones extending out from the speaker voice coils to the mylar, in theory you'll have a super-point-source but in practice it only makes the lack of volume even worse. I've got some half-built experimental drivers sitting here which have some improvements- the magnets were encased in a 2-liter bottle filled with concrete making the unit real heavy, and the voice coils have Ping-Pong balls (with a hole in the back) where the dust cap would be. This sphere shape transmits stresses well, and has a larger contact point.
Those are electrostatics- these are piezos. Electrostatics operate on very high voltages (and very low amperages), and require stator screens. Piezos operate by one side expanding and the other contracting, mechanically pushing most of the speaker area forward or back. There are also center-driven planars (Sumo Aria, Museatex Melior) and line-driven planars (Magnepan).
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It's a peculiar sort of mindset that insists, "This $600 CD has the same value as this $600 computer!" when a buck's worth of plastic and cyanine dye can perfectly duplicate the former, and it'd take years of labor and piles of electronic parts to perfectly duplicate the latter- if you even could, I don't think I could build computer PC boards from scratch.
God help us when we manage to invent the Star Trek Replicator: owning one will be punishable by death. So you want to use it to replicate soup to feed your family? NO SOUP FOR YOU! :P
This is _seriously_ debatable. You are overstating things ridiculously. IP is not _alienable_: as the distribution costs drop to next to nothing, the inherent value of IP drops as well. In the future, IP as such will mean nothing. What IP says about what you are able to create will mean everything. It will be a 'record club' world where, just like RIAA 'record clubs', you get nothing whatsoever out of the distribution of your IP (you _are_ aware the artists get nothing from those?) except for the publicity in an increasingly competitive battle for people's attention.
Furthermore, it's astonishing to see anyone on this side of the year 2000 blithely state that "The more we respect intellectual property, the more of it will be available for us to enjoy and use at reasonable prices". Have you been paying any attention at all to the increasingly crazy world of patents and IP rights? It is absolutely self-evident that there is a limit to how much we should respect intellectual property. We may disagree on where that limit is, but to suggest that 'more respect' is always better is astonishing and deeply questionable. In effect, it completely discounts the idea of social benefit and a public domain. This is unacceptable thinking.
Before you characterise Napster as handguns and copying as theft, you had better look at record clubs, promotion, and ask yourself how much the record company pays to proliferate and publicise musicians through those means, versus how much (0$) the record company pays to have listeners swapping tunes over Napster while paying the bill for the networking themselves.
If you object that the record company controls the former and does not get to control the latter... then you're getting very close to the real issue... but also close to the long history of record company involvement with the Mafia and organized crime, in exerting this control over radio and other media. You see, it's not necessarily a good thing to have that kind of control...
How bad would MS have to get in order to _force_ adoption of alternatives like OSX and Linux, and given that this approach would continue to give them power and money, how do you stop them from just buying Apple and having legislation passed making Linux illegal?
Maybe we're better off muddling through with the antitrust legislation and _not_ giving MS enough rope to hang itself. That is making a big assumption- that it won't first strangle everyone else in the world with that rope, before hanging itself.
There is no reason in the world Microsoft cannot expand into being the only effective source of information, network connectivity, communications, and identification services.
That means you would no longer have a social security number- privatizing would mean you'd have a Microsoft number, and without it you could not buy anything, drive, or vote. This is not unthinkable- look at it as an outsourcing of existing governmental functions.
You can't bitch about not having code because other people don't really owe you anything. I develop 'Mastering Tools' at my own pace to suit my own needs. The point is, through _developing_ free software I make it possible for other people to develop other things, offshoots in which the hard work is done. I don't think anyone without a mastering-grade studio could have tuned the dithers I've written- you need specialised monitoring to do that. But now anyone can make a simple little app that just sticks a different GUI on it, or uses some of the dither routines for, say, a game in which it's important that distant footsteps _sound_ distant, in which depth cues are actually well handled instead of sound blaster crap. This is the way the world works- or should work.
And if nobody re-uses my GPLed routines, that's fine too- I wrote them for _me_ and have already got my investment in time back many times over, in the effectiveness and quality of my new CD mastering processes.
As far as I know, it only makes sense to do that with terms- but I enjoyed it so much I thought it'd make a pretty nifty GUI. The term-only GUI :D
I use the GPL, and am going to continue to use it.
I stand to gain more from acknowledgement of what my software does than from metering and selling the software itself.
I have the _right_ to set my own terms on my own property. It is _their_ rules that so rigorously define my code as my property. I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep if it was as free as air. _They_ are the ones who put such incredible weight on my right to dictate terms and conditions by which my work can be used.
Because of this, my right to use whatever the hell terms I want is almost absolute- and if I choose to contribute to the pool of GPLed free software, they have no business bitching about it.
...is that there is no penguin...
One google search got me a few quotes from the obit.
One more google search with keywords from the quote got me the full text of this famous, scandalous, and essentially truthful obituary, and I read and enjoyed it.
We are living in an age where any schoolchild could do the same. The slightest curiosity about such a thing (and some good search-engine instincts) can open up a vast, immeasurable expanse of culture. Who would go to the library to try and dig this article out of microfilms? But who wouldn't do two quick Google searches to satisfy their curiosity- and come away with a better historical perspective, and a little bit wiser about humanity itself?
My only remaining question is: why would it not be just as proper and valid to be able to do such a search for Roseanne Barr's famously bad singing of the Star Spangled Banner- or a clip of Geraldo being attacked by skinheads on television- or the "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" scene of Apocalypse Now?
The struggle of the Internet is a struggle of public access to culture. The fact that some of the culture is instant, and is still being treated as a product, is irrelevant. In a hundred years, it will all be the background noise of history... unless, of course, we want to make culture and history against the law, or meter it so you can only afford to ingest a tiny bit of the culture you're immersed in.
And that will be difficult... as difficult as establishing secure mass media formats... because not everyone will, or should, submit meekly to such rules.
"RIAA crushes scientific research in Ivy League academia"
The best part is, the USA _does_ have a sort of class system- ask any preppie, ask Dubya's dad. You don't mess with the Ivy League colleges that have produced a disproportionate number of Washington bigshots. You'd have to mess with USC to make deadlier, more-organised enemies- and frankly, the Ivy League plays better in Peoria. Say the names 'Princeton-Harvard-Yale-etc' and an awful lot of people will just kowtow automatically- and say 'RIAA is doing damage to Princeton's academic freedom!' and the same people will bristle, even if they don't fully understand the details.
And the RIAA _did_ try to damage Princeton's academic freedom. They can't weasel out of this, courts don't put much stock in 'we didn't really mean it, honest'. The RIAA _did_ treat Princeton academia as a target to beat into submission. It's on record and public knowledge- and they succeeded, so it's easy for them to say they didn't mean it, now that they got what they wanted.
If you want to use this situation to best advantage, lean on the class angle- that it wasn't some punk in a dingy room surviving on Jolt, but an Ivy League College that was _successfully_ beaten into submission. People would like to think the poshest colleges of the USA are still ivory towers, and threatening and dominating these institutions is REALLY bad PR.
So if you are a Microsoft user in Maryland, you have to be _extra_ good or Microsoft can sue your ass! O_O
How else? Seriously, I don't see why not. The only other alternative is to have the software demand to phone home over the net, which is possibly a more popular method and used in Windows XP and .NET. In that case, rather than the company being authorised to hack into your computer, the company is authorised to sell you products that will intentionally cease to work if you don't keep checking in with the central authorities.
Where have you been, to not know this? Microsoft does this. Other companies do as well. I know that I (a Mac user) returned the mp3 player Macast for a refund because it continually lost its (paid for) registration and demanded to 'phone home' to confirm the legit number I gave it, eventually refusing to honor the number because I'd moved the app to different hard disks too many times.
This isn't the future- it's the past and present. Probably the best response is to continue to be ready to ask for your money back when your software turns out to operate this way, and/or just plain do without stuff that works this way. It's potentially quite a bit more intrusive than government.
The corporations, the power, are one part of that equation. You are another part, just by venting and holding the opinions you do. You're representative of a lot of people.
In particular I always find it amusing when people decide that, just because politicians are corrupt and bribed, that they will STAY bribed. That's a naive view. You've just got to make it a real political hot potato to carry out the will of the corporate 'government', and the reality will continue to be an uncomfortable balance between the various interests involved.
I support the Canadian lawyer's position (isn't this called 'Tort Reform'?) because I'm more or less resigned to the idea that I cannot sue a big corporation for anything. If I'm lucky, another big corporation might sue it- for instance, if it stole ideas of mine and tried to prohibit anyone else from using them, I certainly can't do anything about it but some other corporation that wished to use the ideas might choose to go to court.
The main thing is, these Big Corporations (tm) are obviously developing a real _zeal_ for suing individuals, college professors, magazines, EVERYBODY. It's not even about whether I can sue a big corp and win (not!) it's about whether the corp basically gets to legally destroy the life of anyone it feels like destroying, through legal action.
This process makes government and legal system the private police of the corporation, to be used punitively and subject to no limitation but mere whim: and we already have this situation. Ask the SDMI researchers, the subject of this very article.
It would be an awfully small concession, to give up the purely hypothetical capability to 'sue a corporation' in order to force them to drop the tactic of legal action as a financial and pragmatic club. If you really think you're on an equal footing under the law when bringing suit against a corporation- try it. Your money will run out before you accomplish anything.
It's not so much the fact that Sony or BMG or whoever could grab whatever they liked and flood the market with it giving only credit (and sure, you can undersell them and go 'mine is the official version!' but think for a second about what your distribution network is like, versus what theirs is like)... to some, this would be problem enough, but there are musicians out there who'd accept such a bargain hoping to trade off their hoped-for popularity...
No, the real booby-trap is what I call the 'Singing Munchkin' problem. Basically, if you use this license, you are not simply giving blanket permission to other musicians to work with your music (arguably a good thing, if they're not Puffy), you're also giving, say, Burger King permission to take your music and overdub singing munchkins singing "Whopper whopper yummy whopper yum yum whopper mmm mmm good!" to YOUR MELODY.
This is deadly. (and not just to listener's sanity)
The fact is, you can compose music, write melodies all you want, but when you marry words to them it fixes the melody forever in the listener's mind by providing verbal 'chunks' that are associated with the tune forever. To this day I still associate "Hall Of The Mountain King" with the words "We are all in seventh grade, seventh grade, seventh grade, we are all in seventh grade in Diamond Junior High" thanks to an evil bitch of a music teacher. This is a _horrible_ potential problem.
It's only worsened by the plain and simple fact that if _anything_ really good gets out under (O) licensing, the next move would be for advertising services to pop up that monitor all that content, know some clever audio hacks with Pro Tools and connections with background vocalists, and to set up very competitive commercial music supply based on this source of unencumbered original music- and the ease of editing, remixing and overdubbing onto that stuff. Normal commercial music costs quite a lot by comparison. This 'open music' would drastically change the market for commercial music. What's a little line of original author credit? Nobody reads those when they appear in TV commercials. You might as well have it say 'Original Author sold separately' for all the difference it would make.
Personally, I am going to continue to put "all commercial rights reserved- noncommercial copying OKAY" on all my CDs.
If people want to put stuff on Napster, I'd gladly testify that I consider that noncommercial copying. If people want to put on singing munchkins without my permission and make an ad, surprise! That is COMMERCIAL use and if they want to play that game they have to play by the OLD rules which give me a certain amount of leverage if I don't sign it away. And if someone wants to rip a few bars of rhythm section to use under their rap song or whatever, and they're another artist- for Christ's sake, why not ASK ME? I could fairly easily do a separate mix of just the rhythm section for pretty much anything you want, tailor the mix to the new purpose, _collaborate_ rather than act like some passive victim of copyright violation. All this license nonsense really obscures the fact that some musicians are more than happy to work with others. If you are an artist and want a few bars of my song, don't invent new licenses that would give you permission ahead of time, ASK. You are not alone, you are part of a community if you allow it to happen...
We both would have passed the A+ cert without any studying whatsoever.
We also both thought it was a terribly ridiculous sort of cert to have, if a Mac geek could pass it just by guessing cleverly and knowing what some of the answers _weren't_. I actually beat out my friend the PC tech occasionally :)
Believe me, certs like that are meaningless...
Let's get ready to spread the word on that one. It's just as fair as the way CDs were spun to be better than LPs by use of signal-to-noise ratio figures. Hell, records have better sound than bad mp3s- it's totally legitimate to say at this point that watermarked DVD-A will have substantially worse signal-to-noise ratio than vinyl records, and it is a plausible claim. Naturally, audio CDs will _really_ stomp watermarked DVD-A for signal-to-noise ratio...
The truth, of course, is that you can hear past a noise floor to a certain extent- this is what helps vinyl records, and why dithering is so important for digital audio. This doesn't help the watermarking side much as that's still an annoying type of sound by design, right in the most sensitive hearing band- but it's basically true. However, conventional wisdom is that the noise floor is a hard limit- and this can be turned around as a deadly attack on watermarked media's superiority. Somebody come up with what the signal-to-noise ratio is (including correlated noise) for the worst mp3 you can come up with, like Xing 128K or something. We'll get the word out that watermarked stuff by definition must have a signal-to-noise ratio that is worse even than that...
Which is to say- don't hold your breath. Did you think these things _need_ a TAS to discern them? You'll be able to hear it quite easily on a boombox- or through a Xing mp3 at 128K. That's the _point_.
It's said that the Verance watermark sounds like middle-distance buzzing bees at a higher pitch (buzzing flies?). Which may, in a sick way, be compensated for by the fact that, with the hypercompression techniques in use, there _is_ no middle distance for commercial music anymore- everything is brutally up-front and flattened, and there are no quiet passages that are not compressed to full volume, and loud passages are routinely distorted to the point of flat-topped waves, so this covers up the other sonic ugliness of the buzzing flies sound.
So, the commercial sphere is going to mean extremely high resolution media containing totally smashed and flattened audio of relentless, ear-fatiguing aggressiveness, which contains in the background a noise of buzzing flies or some other uncorrelated noise at least 6 DB louder than the current worst possible CD-audio quantization noise, or to look at it another way, a noise of buzzing flies or some other such extraneous sound that is always louder than the worst distortion components produced by mp3 encoders such as Xing.
I couldn't make this up if I tried... and it's appalling, but it also offers an opportunity.
There are places out there gearing up to give indie musicians the capacity to do music distribution without going through a label. Largest is the rip-off mp3.com, which only lets you sell CDs made from 128K (inadequate) mp3s. Of course, by definition this is still less distortion than DVD-A with watermarks... however, there's others, and the one I'm most a fan of is ampcast.com, which is just finishing up their own CD program, with the option to have CDs duped from Red Book master CDRs you supply to Ampcast: burn-to-order of _real_ CDs. (Burning from special 256K and up mp3s not available for download is also an option.)
The thing is, there's an extra thing Ampcast is doing- they are taking pains to allow the artists to tap into the existing distribution networks. You can buy an official barcode for your CD through them for $20 a barcode- and get them shrinkwrapped with spine stickers, everything you'd want to have your stuff alongside commercial releases and look just the same as them.
The catch is- maybe you don't _want_ your indie stuff to fight its way into that channel. You can always sell it over the net, after all, and go for alternative distribution- and more relevantly, there was a time when the stuff with barcodes _sounded_ _better_ than what people could do in their garages. But that time is gone! These days, not only is electronic, computer-generated music more popular, but the facilities for producing commercial-quality music have never been more affordable- and at the same time, the people producing the commercial music are increasingly _wrecking_ it with compression and blatant overlimiting (so you could do just as well, sonically, with Pro Tools, or better if you chose), but they are also preparing to add uncorrelated noise many times as bad as the noise of clean old vinyl records (or the quantization noise of the very worst CD transfers), _intended_ to be worse than the worst an mp3 encoder can do!
So in a way, the logical thing would be to run screaming- to abandon even the idea of sharing the same shelves with that crap, and try to establish a sort of underground that would most likely be centered on CDs done right. CDs done right (with recent improvements in dither technology) are surprisingly good, even compared to high end analog media. And we can be absolutely sure that the record industry will never produce anything as good as CDs done right again (barring a total collapse and recalibration of their values). The one-two punch of volume wars and watermarks will keep them totally pinned, hopelessly committed to debilitating and selfish practices that ruin their reputation for professional sound quality...
How hard will it be for an indie or a producer of free digital music to include their works in the database- and more importantly, is there going to be support for an opt _in_ list on things like Napster: like "This fingerprint HAS permission to be involved in noncommercial copying, to any extent"? I'm wondering if the whole technology will be hijacked so you in practice cannot both have your fingerprints on file, and cooperate with services like Napster. Your submitting prints of your stuff will automatically cause them to be thrown off all forms of fair-use file sharing, but you don't get paid anything out of the taxes collected and given to the RIAA. Sort of worst of both worlds.
I would ask, has anyone at Eazel heard of the terms 'cash flow' or 'break even point'? If all they know is 'burn rate' they're in big, big trouble... and if their mental picture of a business is Apple, they're absolutely fscked. Apple is neat, Apple is great, Apple has been an amazing place to work for many people, but Apple is a Fortune 500 company monster corporation that has long been able to throw a million dollars at this and that just in case it produces technology that might turn Mac users on. Jobs kickstarted this, by having Apple pay for backrubs and freshly squeezed orange juice for the first Macintosh creators (work 18 hours a day, but in an atmosphere of elitism, luxury and insecurity- worked pretty well) and then when he was canned, they forgot about the insecurity part and Apple people got used to working with basically unlimited resources. When Jobs returned he brought insecurity back to Apple and killed a lot of projects and scared people into producing like mad again- result, iMac, the cube, lots of good and bad products that were less boring.
But the common factor is that Apple people don't really think in terms of budget. They produce neat stuff but this is not the background you want, if you expect to manage a small business and have it survive- and all free and open-source projects more closely resemble small business than big business. It's about not running out of cash, managing your expenditures so you can keep going on a month-by-month basis. If you've got yourself into a position where you're going, "Unless we land this big investment we will run out of cash next month!" you have already lost. Go turn into a 501c3 nonprofit and s/investment/contribution/.
That's not last year, or this year- that was back in 1986. Before the 70s, it was like one or two trillion a year, and then it started to snowball. Finance is by far the biggest customer of communications networks.
Taking out the world's financial networks for a second would impede $2 grand worth of transactions. A minute of downtime a year would be $165K- an hour, nine million dollars. And that is from the 1986 figures- more than a decade ago. Any guesses on how much of the world's financial transactions go over the net now?
It's true. Or to be more accurate- the world's finances could be sabotaged in this way quite easily. The weird thing is, it's already taking damage just from stuff like Microsoft's irresponsibility- you don't have to have a malicious geek with a trenchcoat to cause billions of dollars of financial damages. Your software vendor can do you that kind of damage without even thinking, charge you for it, and then go set you up for even more.
In order to do composite drivers, you have to go with simpler crossovers, not more complex- phase relationships have to be dead simple, the normal rules for multi-element speakers are entirely reversed.
Electrostatics and planars do what they do not just by having the speaker handle all frequencies with one element, but by having the element behave more controllably than cone drivers. Use of very light elements can mean little or no overshoot or ringing at bass frequencies. That ringing is what would really create 'doppler' effects on the sound- having the speaker follow the path of the waveform as one unit does not cause any sort of distortion in itself.
The roll-up piezo speakers are likely to be fairly crappy sound, but this is mostly because they're lacking in any sort of solid stand or base to push against, and the piezo operates by flexing and going convex or concave. Clamp the edges and you'll get more bass and general fidelity.
I've experimented with these fairly extensively, and still am from time to time. DIYing center-driven stretched-mylar speakers is fun, but tricky to make useful. Here's what I learned:
DIY is fun
I don't know what you'd have to do to get a huge plasma speaker that could carry bass, but I don't want to be around while you try it :)
Those are electrostatics- these are piezos. Electrostatics operate on very high voltages (and very low amperages), and require stator screens. Piezos operate by one side expanding and the other contracting, mechanically pushing most of the speaker area forward or back. There are also center-driven planars (Sumo Aria, Museatex Melior) and line-driven planars (Magnepan).