Actually, I think it would make a lot of sense to formally define stealing as 'taking something away from someone so they don't have it anymore'. Otherwise, life will just keep getting more and more nonsensical, and you'll end up legally forbidden to _think_ about enjoyable IP, or to hum tunes as you walk down the street.
Funny how Napster users are treated as criminals- but Puffy is supposedly okay! Be careful that your positions are internally consistent- on some level you're stubbornly defending Puffy's 'right' to earn money from rapping over other people's sampled music. It doesn't wash...
That's much the same as what I do: I record music and give away compressed digital copies for FREE to undercut my own deeply entrenched, monopolistic competition. I'm setting up to be able to sell uncompressed hard copies for money, random paraphenalia like shirts and mousepads, and expect to always price my compressed digital copies of my music at $0, and I _do_ wish to 'beat' the guys trying to charge for mp3s by doing so.
I don't agree with _everything_ Julian says, but being allowed (as a little struggling small player in the market) to put out 'loss leaders' is something I won't lightly give up. I can see how important it is to be able to put out open source work and develop a reputation for your free work, too. Well put.
If you don't want to invent new things, then for God's sake, don't. Leave it to others- like the researcher (pre-dating Xerox PARC) Douglas C. Engelbart, who not only made experimental demos of the first GUI but also invented the first mouse. You are also free to assume nobody will ever invent anything unless paid: a very bankerlike notion, though oddly enough I don't know of many bankers who invent things, so they would appear to not be the people to ask.
Seriously, if you don't like inventing things just for the sake of solving the problems that arise, please get out of the way, take your toys and your capital and go home. There is a huge amount that can be done without capital. Most of Linux was done without capital. Gene research etc. is a very small percentage of the total invention and research done in the world...
Slashdot ate my rant in a server hiccup, but that's just as well because this might be a better thread to rant in anyhow. This was originally in the new P2P thread, or would have been if it'd posted normally. Given the attitudes I'm seeing from early posters here I figured it was worth persevering. This is mostly about how uncontrolled peer-to-peer helps me by breaking down artificial barriers to distribution, and how charging for mp3s isn't remotely necessary...
Regarding napster or any P2P thing, all I can say is: please include my content in whatever peer-to-peer network is the latest greatest thing.
I am not essentially a consumer. I don't have time to keep in touch with the latest P2P developments- because my time is spent keeping in touch with what affects me as an artist.
It may interest you to know that as an artist using P2P as distribution, I have access to print-to-order stuff over the net, everything from T-shirts to mousepads to coffee mugs, all of which can have my GFX or whatever on it, and I can get paid for selling _real_ _tangible_ stuff... and the very latest development (ampcast.com, just the other day, announced this one) is that I can go to a _good_ hosting service with a fair contract and good artist relations and get Red Book Audio CDs burned to order over the net. This isn't ready yet but it's due by the end of March: I supply a CDR master (I can get professional quality as will quickly become apparent: this is what I do...) and they keep it on file, burn from it when a copy is ordered and keep an image of the CD for 30 days on HD in case of repeat orders to save on filing and handling hassles.
I can't begin to express how awesome this is: it's the first time I'm aware of that a musician could set up a burn-to-order fulfillment service (and not have to deal with juggling CDR blanks, inventory etc, or even taking orders) and be selling full-on, uncompressed, bit-for-bit untampered Red Book Audio CDs over the net, with color booklets and inserts! It's the epitome of the internet musician's wet dream, and should be a very nice business for Ampcast.
And it profoundly legitimises peer-to-peer: now, mp3s (or whatever) really _have_ a value. If they get into the hands of someone who wants a proper REAL CD of the music, now they can have one- and if nobody wants one, hey, nobody's out anything! Ampcast just stores one extra boring CD in the files, they're not out the cost of printing up thousands of the things, and I'm not out anything either, except the cost of the CD blank.
This year will see the final maturing of the complete product support network for the internet musician- with burn/print to order for everything from shirts to full-on audio CDs to fscking _mousepads_ we're practically at the level of 'Jackson 5' merchandising capabilities, without using the record industry. That is very, very exciting... now the only thing I'd like to see is print-to-order _posters_... that is just about the only thing left that isn't already covered!
Amazing, amazing... and P2P is the distribution network for publicising this stuff. None of it expects any sort of formal promotion efforts- it's all totally grassroots... which I think is no sort of accident, I think this is the natural reaction to increasing corporatization. People _want_ to discover their own stuff, even stuff that's 'no commercial potential' (as written on old Mothers Of Invention album covers), and having discovered it they'll buy tangible stuff to go with the free digital stuff they have, so long as the tangible stuff is good. What they won't do is be forced to pay money for totally intangible digital stuff that the corporate seller didn't have to pay anything to copy out- that's doomed, the future of making money fairly through IP is being able to offer stuff that is physical and real, that people might enjoy. (Italicisation of stuff in honor of Frank Zappa's typographical style and George Carlin)
Seriously, I always suspected but now I know that the future of being a small indie 'content producer' is to take complete advantage of everything that you can possibly give away or share for free- any digital files, etc, anything at all that you don't have to pay for actual materials, throw it out there! And then, find something that you can sell that is _tangible_ and physical, stuff to rumple and fetish as FZ put it. Shirts to wear, CDs to give nicer sounds and be hard-copy that can't be lost in HD crashes, mousepads to use (different band for every day of the week, why not?) mugs to hold COFFEE etc etc, _physical_ stuff.
Because the equalising effect of worldwide communications makes it possible... put it this way. I've been on besonic for a while, rarely if ever do any promoting, but for some reason lots of people in Sweden have listened to my music. Who knew? I have a track off an electronic album that is very warm and mellow called 'Wood Dragon': at one point it was one of the highest ranking easy listening tracks in Japan. Again, who knew? Supposing I saw that and decided to explore the easy-listening-electronic area some more for the people in Japan who enjoyed it, throwing in some woodflutes and obscure pentatonic intervals (I researched Japanese melodies for a later track and quite liked them). Supposing I made lovely high-fidelity audio CDs available, and stuff like shirts and mousepads, minimising English text and sticking to elegant graphic designs since I know that it's Japan which was showing an interest in the stuff. I could do quite well that way- not getting rich, but paying some bills and buying more synths etc- by doing _good_ _work_ and selling only tangible, real stuff. This is real. The future is now...
So support the P2P networks! This is not about greedy consumers wanting stuff for free. It's about communication and _information_ and I promise you, as an artist, I couldn't GET demographic information like that out of the record companies. The only alternative to P2P and artist independence is the record companies (and other forms of distribution controls and let me tell you a little story...
I hang out on a mastering engineer list- and recently one of the top guys came out with a chilling story. He'd worked with an artist for weeks to get the ideal mastering for the artist's CD, testing it in actual clubs, working like mad to balance it just perfectly so it was the best it could possibly be. Then a new A&R guy was assigned to the artist, and against my engineer friend's AND the artist's wishes, decided to assign the mastering to another mastering guy: which is known as a 'shoot-out'. Usually the label wants 'louder, brighter, more' from such a situation, and it's gotten to the point where mastering engineers are _ruining_ the sounds of records just because the labels are _demanding_ that the new record's gotta be louder than the next guy. My friend, I believe, did a terrific job on the CD- just what the ARTIST wanted- but it is _always_ possible to make a CD louder by making it sound worse. And I think that's just what's going to happen, and I pity the artist, because all their work is going to be butchered by a mastering job that squashes it into extreme loudness and ruins the tone- it probably won't even sound as good in the clubs! All because of a new A&R guy who outranks both the original mastering guy and the artist. It's anybody's guess as to whether the artist's career can survive releasing a CD that sounds like crap- you don't get many chances in the music business, and the new mastering engineer has a vested interest in making his mastering sound as _different_ as possible from the original one that took so much painstaking work.
Now, all the mastering guys are absolutely miserable about this general state of affairs, it's hurting the industry, it's hurting the sound of modern releases, and there seems to be no way to get the record companies to stop doing it.
But now, indie content producers can put out full quality audio CDs and none of them are forced to do any such thing- they have _total_ freedom to do whatever their artistic judgement dictates, with the result succeeding or failing purely on its merits- the 'word' of it getting out primarily through word-of-mouth and P2P.
THAT is why artists desperately need P2P to thrive and continue- because without it, it is less and less likely that the consumer will even be allowed to hear their art, because already if they have to go through existing channels, the consumer IS NOT allowed to hear their art until label suits have specified which songs, albums etc will be allowed to be released, until A&R guys have dictated the use of mastering engineers counter to the artist's wishes and specifically told the mastering guy to ruin the sound to make it louder louder louder, until corporate execs have decided which markets they're even going to sell the CD in and which markets they are not going to allow it to be available at all.
Only then does the consumer get to 'choose' what they want.
Maybe you want to take that up with David Boies, whose argument is that this NONCOMMERCIAL copying is not illegal (read the law!). Given that, we've got cops acting as the private police force of big corporations. The other explanation is that in Belgium, noncommercial copying is illegal. The other other explanation is that these people being raided are actually running businesses in which they are burning CDs (perhaps of CDs that have not been released by the record companies in Belgium, and won't be: see DVD region control practices, not everything necessarily gets to Belgium) and selling them.
You're right but it's still a stereotype. You can't let THESE guys define what the American way is, just because they jump up and down blathering on about it. A lot of americans pursue other ways. I think FDR's "New Deal" was the American Way. I think the Four Freedoms are the American Way. I don't accept that greed and economic destruction of the weak are the American Way. Did you know that one of FDR's Four Freedoms that WWII was fought over was freedom from want? That another was freedom from fear? Compare with the Microsoft Way. You should also read Madison in Federalist #10 about the evils of faction and the need to put pressure on the largest factions so they don't just plain steamroller all the others. THAT is the American Way to me, seeing these problems and deciding to try and improve the situation, even if imperfectly, but to go ahead and make the effort- who cares if you aren't guaranteed success, TRY anyway! That to me is the American Way. That is what I practice, and sometimes it works, and when it works it's great:) when it doesn't, at least I tried...
Interestingly, just before reading the article I'd read another article on CNet claiming that 95% of tech businesses are random organizations that need to develop a habit of earning trust by being more open and KEEPING THEIR PROMISES... I think this may be part of the reason why I literally laughed out loud reading Jim Allchin's remarks. Poor silly fellow... he does not have the public relations leverage he thinks he has. Now, if Microsoft had been telling the truth and being honest with people all these years, it might be different, but who doesn't know they lie and even fake stuff in court, by now?
Your faith in the honesty of Microsoft's accounting practices is touching:)
Seriously, listen to yourself for a second. You sound just a _bit_ like you're wearing a tinfoil helmet... the fact is, Microsoft is a public company with truly staggering expenses and an entire culture _based_ on geometric expansion. It doesn't matter _how_ much money they have (and which set of figures are you looking at?), they're not spending it any slower.
I honestly, seriously believe that if Microsoft is absolved of all wrongdoing by the courts their next move is to run themselves into massive debt through uncontrolled expenditures and implode. It's possible this would destroy them a lot better than a court-ordered breakup. Steve Ballmer agrees with me and has made public statements about wanting to alter Microsoft's very culture into more of a culture of frugality (ha! not!). Who are you going to believe, me and Ballmer, or some PR flack feeding you nonsense about MS invincibility? That's what they're _paid_ to do...
Yes, a kid with a Sound Blaster cannot possibly reproduce the results of a 128-track Neve/Neumann/Apogee-packin' studio in a dedicated facility, but guess what? The bottom line is _technology_, not money. And it's very true that the technology is more and more attainable- it'd take a dedicated effort to stamp that out (as happened with DAT) and I think it's too late.
Someone mentioned SM57s in an earlier thread, dismissing them as 'toy' mics, colored and useless for professional use. Um. *g* apart from the fact that they're still a classic snare mic and general drumkit mic, their distinctive coloration has always been hugely popular at all levels, right up to the top: on the Division Bell Pink Floyd tour, the backing singers used SM51 condenser mics, but David Gilmour chose to sing through a SM58- described as a 'regular' SM58. Not only that- both Gary Wallis's and Nick Mason's snare drums were miked with SM57s!
It's like that all over, now. The hottest new compressor available is not a $3000 tube optoelectronic recreation of vintage compressors- it's a little 1/3 rack space unit by a little company called FMR Audio and it's named the Really Nice Compressor, or RNC- running a purely analog signal path, but digital circuitry to cascade as many as three compression staged to specify the control gain in SuperNice mode, this compressor is _the_ hot gain reduction device out there right now- and it's $199 MSRP.
Give a person one of these, a couple SM57s, impedance matching transformers and either a half-decent PC soundcard or any old Powermac, and they will be able to record an acoustic event with sound quality that is more than acceptable. They probably cannot afford _really_ good digital compression, but the RNC will easily beat any but the most top-of-the-line digital compression and feed the soundcard or powermac with the most ideal signal it could ask for, leaving little or nothing to do in the digital domain- unless you want to, of course, and then it'd provide a great launching-point for entertaining digital effects and radical sounds.
You can go the other direction as well, away from digital effects and sounds. Check "B17 Flying Fortress" or "Supermarine Spitfire" at www.besonic.com/chrisj. I happen to _like_ the big-studio sound. Some of the techniques used to get that are very clean, pure signal paths and good components inside the equipment. You can do that at home, too, and I did, including the heavy modding of my 20-bit ADAT because it sounded thin. As a result, "B17 Flying Fortress" has a bigness and spaciousness that you cannot get outside of a big studio- except, surprise! I got it in my apartment, and so can you, if you like that approach. You can have ANYTHING you want now, if you're willing to do the work, learn a lot, and push the envelope. Sometimes the guys selling the equipment aren't the most honest sources of information about what decisions you should make...
I see this as analogous to Linux itself. It is no different from saying, 'You can't have a really proper operating system unless you pay a lot of money for it and have a large company supporting it'. The truth is, such performance happens because of _reasons_: and just as a bunch of programmers can get together and cooperate working on an OS, sound engineers and audio tinkerers can get together and work on gear that will bring big-studio performance to apartments and basements. It started with the Tom Scholz 'Rockman' and the Shure SM58, is continuing with the RNC compressor, and I think the market is actually getting even _better_ what with the ability of people to find out about stuff like the RNC without having to go through a lot of industry middlemen.
You can even do _room_ treatment for super cheap, and I'm not talking about 'dead-room' stuff like putting up egg crates (useless) or covering everything with blankets (yucky dead high end, doesn't help lower room modes much). Here's what I did: stumbled across a box of furnace air filters, realised 'hey, this is a 25x16x2 cardboard box filled with fibreglass, lacking only the front and back face to make it a sort of weak bass trap!', got about $100 of foam-core art board (chosen for lightness, rigidity, and reflectiveness in the high frequencies) and made lots and lots of plain boxes, reflective at higher frequencies, moderately absorptive with resistive damping at low frequencies, and innocuous-looking- and put them up all around my studio room and miking room. The 2" spacing out from the walls did great things for flutter echo- there's a test called the 'clap test' where you clap, making the room go 'rinnng', and the difference from these cheap things is NOT subtle. I don't know or care how much better professional room treatment would be since _real_ diffusers would be hundreds of dollars for just _one_ unit smaller than the dozen I made- the point is, it's not about the money. It's about understanding the principle, the technology, and _using_ that to better your situation. And yes, you can even do proper room treatment with diffusers and real bass traps cheaply, you only have to be willing to DIY! And make more of the treatment because it'll not be fully as effective as the kilobuck stuff. No sweat...
By the way, if the guitar tones on those tracks sounded nice enough that you _want_ 'em, I'm just on the verge of dropping a big chunk of loan money on a project that will put me in the 'manufacturer' camp. I'm going to be building guitar preamps that are as good at their job as the RNC is at its- and they'll be no more expensive. I think I can really beat the crap out of the sound quality of Line 6 'POD' products, musically, at the cost of not being able to get tones quite as muddy and rumbly as the POD can. When I have prototypes built that really reflect the final product rather than (as of now) just being proof of concept for the technologies, I'll be making mp3s available that can be compared to the mp3s you can easily get of all the digital amp modelling effect devices like the POD.
Even if my tones aren't what people are madly looking for, there's going to be others out there, it'll be just a question of education. If you just go to the store and buy what they tell you, your sound will probably correlate to the amount of money you spent (including on engineering lessons, obviously!). If you use the Net and your brain and the resources of your community and are willing to work hard and DIY, you'll be able to put out sonics that compete with _anybody_ at virtually any price point. That's not going to go away, now. It's a factor of networking and accessibility of information of all types. In 2001 and beyond, _expertise_ is the key factor, because you're not confined to just what some company is willing to sell you. Ten years ago you couldn't go look at a RNC online and buy one- and they couldn't get their message to you without going through distributors who'd rather be selling Sony. Things are different now, get used to it, make use of it...
Actually, mp3.com is one of the worst places you could sign with at this point- artist conditions have declined radically in just a couple years.
The contract is now changeable by mp3.com at any time without consent of the artist
The contract gives permanent rights to mp3.com even after you terminate it, which isn't a good position to be in
You must _pay_ monthly, per 'band' (many people have a whole stable of projects) for preferred treatment in order to have your songs go live in a timely fashion. The amount, around $20 per month per band, seriously exceeds the income of 99% of the acts.
mp3.com encourages you to get, and promote, an 'express URL' (such as the one I have at besonic, www.besonic.com/chrisj) but the thing is, mp3.com have taken to seizing people's express URLs and reassigning them to major label artists. The pages the URLs now point to do not actually have mp3s on them- they're links to online CD shopping! This makes promotion virtually impossible- at any time the URL you're promoting and printing onto materials can be seized and given to a major label act that DIDN'T EVEN ASK for it.
They've just raised the price of the DAM CD program: instead of these burn-to-order audio CDs (burned entirely from 128K mp3s, remember) being $5.99 to $14.99 (plus a couple bucks shipping), new CDs must cost at least $6.99 not counting shipping and can be as high as $30 for a CDR burned off 128K mp3s! Most artists who were selling CDs were using the $5.99 price and getting a bit under $3 from it. Going in the direction of major-label-cartel CD pricing without even the audio quality to justify it is _not_ a win...
It is possible that, doing all these things, especially _charging_ most musicians for timely service and hosting, mp3.com will not roll over and die, and I suppose there's some merit to that. But they are already doing the things that so outrage slashdotters when they happen to, for instance, domain names, and I don't think they deserve any more artists. Do business with them if you want, but read your contract because it does matter, and consider giving your music hosting to a smaller, better competitor like besonic.com or ampcast.com.
Wow- Commie Relevancy! Who knew?
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The Jungle
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One particular thing really jumped out at me reading this- funny thing is, I never _had_ read this- and it was the words "Free Trade". Shouldn't have surprised me at all, though.
I mean, who _else_ would be so likely to accept the notion that Free Trade means, "Ever lose your job to a guy in Korea who works 18 hours a day in leg shackles for a bowl of rice, because he's cheaper to hire than you? YOU WILL!"
One thing Marx missed, however- he's assuming an _industrial_ proletariat. This is railroad-era thinking: this is a condemnation of capitalism in which the barriers for entry are as high as, say, a software company wanting to sell a new word processor. When Marx was writing this stuff, access to industrialisation was severely limited, networking was severely restricted, and your marketing was entirely a matter of brick-and-mortar installations, a whole network that had to be supported. This is why small craftsmen were ground under the wheels.
2001 turns out to have eBay and UPS and Napster and Slashdot and Linux (as examples of these _types_ of services). Marx would've loved Linux: it's controlled by the proletariat and gives all the tools of virtual industrialization to the proletariat. This is a really big difference from the industrial-age world Marx knew. How big, remains to be seen. Clearly, the bourgeoisie still retains a lot of power to put up barriers to entry- we see this most easily with Microsoft trying to technically produce obstacles for Linux, because they are unusually aggressive for bourgeoisie. But it's also seen in the consolidation of vast media empires that control what we hear and see for news and entertainment. Yet, at the same time, the foundations are crumbling, and individuals, artisans, craftsmen such as Marx talks about, begin to have an unprecedented ability to network with clients, customers, helpers across the globe, and the ability to interact AS IF they were industrial titans, in some cases.
An example: suppose you make cars, and you need a certain steel bracket. Traditionally, you need to order 100,000 of these brackets from somebody, or invest in the heavy machinery to fabricate them yourself. Either way, someone makes lots of brackets and keeps them in warehouses and they sell, or not. But with computerised order fulfillment systems (not to mention computerised fabricate-to-order systems!) you can order 100. Possibly in the future you can order 10- or 1- without nasty price hikes. Compare the history of record and CD pressing with mp3.com's pioneering 'DAM' CD system, which is now widely imitated and improved upon, and which allows fabrication of _single_ CDs for order fulfillment- or the history of T-shirt and mug printing with CafePress, which likewise allows fabrication of _single_ items for order fulfillment.
These issues _are_ the foundation of the industrial age: both ability and necessity to mass produce. Now the ability is still there- but due to the ever-increasing sophistication of the machinery, the necessity is not- which is enormously significant.
If you want the world forced into a Communist Revolution for good or ill, keep on encouraging barriers to entry, 'free trade' and the ability of large corporations to exert economic leverage against smaller players and/or individuals. Down with Napster, down with eBay, down with libraries, and everybody aboard the corporate ferryboat- which will not wait, and has no stops because you've no business choosing where you want to go!
If you want Marx to be a footnote to history, support every form of decentralisation and breaking of the barriers to entry that you can. Consider the right of a crappy garage musician to put mp3s on Napster for free as MORE important than the right of Britney Spears to earn record companies billions. Support Linux and open source and fight Microsoft's efforts to create a world where Windows is required for most internet tasks (Active Directory, etc ad infinitum). If Apple tries the same stuff, fight them too!
The only way to _make_ Marx irrelevant and useless is to _remove_ the problems he identifies, or at least have a good hard try at it. If you decide he's a creep and do everything opposite to what he demands, you are only creating the pressing need for just such a revolution as he agitates for- and that might not be the best thing. It's better to say 'No revolution here today, thank you- now here's what we'll do instead' and GO AFTER the problems he correctly identifies. Do that and all the ranting about bourgeoisie starts to look foolish. Marx is like Linux, fighting him and what he believes in only makes him stronger...
Though I gotta admit one thing: slashdotters in particular ought to be well aware by now how many people are FREAKING IDIOTS! How many of you work helpdesk, or struggle with management? Now, consider the complete idiots you've encountered. Do you figure they would throw a kitten violently to the floor because a web page told them it would bounce? You bet they would, because they are IDIOTS. And it's all very well their being idiots, but I don't see how the resulting kittens going 'splat' should be held responsible.
So there _is_ an argument against running the bonsaikitten site in its current form, with no disclaimer- the argument that people are _such_ idiots that, guaranteed, some idiot is gonna try to bounce a kitten, and kill or maim it.
And yeah, there are worse things that happen in the world, but why _bait_ idiots to be idiots? Most idiots don't come up with ideas _that_ bad on their own: they're baited into it as a joke. It's not good judgement to joke that way. All the talk about Klein bottles is one thing, as it's too difficult for an idiot to prepare the glassware and the obvious result is the idiot writes to BonsaiKitten and wants to buy a finished one. But the bouncing thing? Idiots are going to _do_ that, and that's a shame, and it's not necessary. I think there's even going to be a few idiots who keep trying harder and harder when it doesn't work. Idiots suck...
Well... I'm a cat fanatic, and so logically I _ought_ to be offended. But on the other hand, I find 'Dysfunctional Family Circus' hysterically funny, and that is at least as sick if not more so. Therefore, I am forced to accept that bonsaikitten.com is funny too- if melonheaded mutant children are funny, then so are cube-shaped kittens.;)
Actually it can be hard, specialised work being an artist, but you're not talking about that sort, you're talking about MTV 'divas' and boy bands and manufactured stars etc.
In addition, it can be hard specialised work being a _plumber_, or a toilet maintenance expert, or a long distance truck driver, or a pallet loader at UPS. Nobody behaves like these people are deities, but they sure are useful.
In my way I am an artist. I can honestly say that I work at it as hard as any top-of-the-line plumber, or UPS pallet loader. There's a lot that goes into it, and it costs a lot for equipment, and requires some pretty serious dedication to learn the craft. I think it is absolutely absurd to expect to be treated like Picasso just for being _an_ artist (thing about Picasso is, not only was he an absolute virtuoso but he kept it up his entire life), but I do expect to get as much respect as a UPS pallet loader or long distance trucker- and, in turn, extend it instead of getting all haughty and Mick Jagger about it;)
The fact is, any artist who's any good either is a bit of an idiot savant or put a lot of work into their craft or both. I admit to both. But I only want the _chance_ to earn respect over my lifetime as a music creator (not 'career', music business careers are about 2 1/2 years now if you're lucky).
That isn't the same thing as saying I want the chance to earn _money_. If digital copying means almost nobody makes or is forced to spend lots of money as a musician, I can accept that. But in order to have the chance to earn respect I need to continue to be able to produce digital music myself and have people download it. That's what's at risk now- the danger is, the content controls will lock down so much that people won't be _allowed_ to listen to what I'm able to produce unless I go through channels. That's bad.
Absolutely. Right now I'm trying to operate in the 'indie' sphere, and I can't be too bothered about the fact that the industry has most of the world well brainwashed to not listen to 'garage' music- because I can see the danger that it will get even _worse_.
Let me put it this way: I have music at besonic.com/chrisj for free downloading. There's a lot there- put a lot of effort into it because it's what I love to do and I can't get music like what I want out of the major labels anyhow, gotta make it myself.
That said, there comes a point where I don't even care if people go listen to this music- what I am appreciating is a situation where people can go listen to it, if they like, without costing me anything. I can't maintain a distribution network that would put physical CDs in people's hands all over the world for pennies or for free- the CDs that I have made are white elephants, physical media isn't as popular as it used to be, it's a losing deal. Internet distribution is so much better because it's so much more flexible...
So, my primary concern here is not to get better access to major label stuff (I don't even care- it basically sucks, who wants it?) or to gain equal access for my stuff. I'm perfectly happy to have a situation where my stuff can only thrive on its own merits, always out-publicised by other stuff. What I don't want is to be outflanked- don't want to lose the distribution media (redbook CD audio, mp3, internet file distribution) that I _do_ have available at this time.
I consider that a very serious risk- after all, every single one of those taken-for-granted technologies is under attack, up to and including redbook CD audio (see BMG's attempts to introduce a copy protected version). So from my perspective, I totally, completely agree that the music industry wants to be able to force people to buy their products and only their products. As an independent musician, studio owner, recording and mastering engineer not affiliated with the RIAA, I really don't like the idea of the general public being forced _not_ to buy/use _my_ products. Call that capitalism? *spit*
It's a 'boiling the frog' problem- do it slowly and steadily enough and the general public doesn't really notice, particularly when they're not told. The general public does not, for instance, understand exactly what 'music CDRs' are, or why they are more expensive, where the money goes, why some newer players may refuse to play music off 'data CDRs'. None of this is done in daylight- it's done in scheming silence as a fait accompli. It's done through totalitarian processes rather than capitalistic processes, and the intended result resembles state socialism as practiced by the USSR rather than capitalism.
It's funny how much respect I've gained for capitalism once I figured out we Americans don't have it. I'd like to see us have more of it, in addition to the socialist tinge that moderates our government. There's no freaking point in proceeding with a corporate oligarchy totalitarian state and then grudgingly slapping a coat of social-policy socialism onto it to cover up the uglier bits. If we expect to be considered 'capitalist' by history we'd better shape up and start considering the nature of power and where it settles, and take steps to establish that we do have something at least vaguely resembling a free market.
I'm here to tell you that a world in which the only way you can distribute music content to consumers is through corporate-controlled encrypted formats backed by law is not even vaguely resembling a free market from where I'm standing. Please do everything possible to prevent things ever getting to that state, even to the point of boycotting the RIAA labels and intentionally pirating their wares to injure their profit, which is being used against capitalism and for totalitarianism.
I won't be doing that part because I have my hands full simply taking care of my side of things- upgrading my studio, producing music intended to be circulated freely, keeping informed of how things are in the music business. But because of the direction I see things going, I have to say I completely support and respect anyone who's actually trying to use music piracy as a weapon to hurt the RIAA labels. Hey, name one other weapon we have? I don't see any other defense against them, and just because it's not being fought in _your_ trenches doesn't mean it's not a war.
I daresay your comments relate to ESR fairly well, but it's breathtaking how deeply you misunderstand RMS and his popularity. Do you _like_ RMS yourself, and what he stands for, or are you just making assumptions that his following is driven by the same goals as ESR fans?
The reason RMS is held in high regard is because he personally, consistently, and repeatedly acts against the zero-sum concept wherever it presents itself. He began doing this when a LISP machine company gutted the MIT computer lab, imposing zero-sum conditions and blocking communication, and Stallman personally and singlehandedly reverse-engineered huge amounts of IP simply to give them to the 'loser' in the equation. He invented the GPL and specifically designed it so the single overriding requirement it imposes is that you may not make GPLed software zero-sum! It must always be left as an unlimited resource that cannot be seized as property by any 'player'. He continues to follow this purpose in everything he does, and won't bend an inch to accomodate those who want to make things more into 'winners' and 'losers'. To him, you are either part of the free society cooperating completely and socially, or you're in the way and need to stop being in the way, or be run over. If you're in the way you're not a competitor- you're a WALL. You're a locked door and the point is to open you, not beat you...
Are you (heh, 'WindowsTroll'. didn't notice that at first) following any of this? It's difficult to open a mind that is completely set in its ways. Whether or not you're following this, it can be summed up as, "No, that is not the way things are." Zero-sum and social ways of doing things coexist. They have _always_ coexisted, and your argument that social ways don't exist is just plain wrong- as wrong as a contrasting argument that competition and zero-sum could be completely eliminated.
In the event that your arguing itself is zero-sum, and the expectation that you'll just plain deny what I'm saying, I would have to say- fine, believe what you want. There's room in the world for your way of thinking. However, you are not entitled to be treated as if your way of thinking was the ONLY way of thinking- because there is also room in the world for cooperation at all levels, up to the very highest and down to the simplest level- and whether you like it or not, people are going to go on cooperating without your approval.
...because life is not a zero-sum game, and because your 'it's about winning, baby' viewpoint... hasn't won >:)
_Stop_ the presses. My god- Microsoft says Linux is going to fizzle! This is clearly hot breaking news worthy of a special story.
Next, a special exclusive in which tobacco company execs shock everyone by suggesting smoking isn't that bad for you really!
OK, so let's get this straight
on
OS X on x86?
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· Score: 2
OK, so for software you have: Microsoft. For 3D cards you have: nVidia. For sound cards you have: Creative Labs. In all these cases it's the result of market consolidation, buy-outs, even pressure like Creative destroying Aureal.
You want to add to that, for CPUs you have: intel compatible, AND for OSes you have: Windows?
Why, for God's sake? Is this an expression of faith that consolidation of markets doesn't really happen except for Microsoft, nVidia and Creative Labs? Leave MacOS hardware and software in the perfectly good niche they're in. Why screw that up?
We're not so far off as that. My brain-vise of the day (come on, let's have just another _quarter_ turn of the vise, I'm not screaming yet) has to do with banks.
Background- last year, I took out a bank loan, using my folks as a co-sign, for some recording equipment. Got that, everything was fine, did not miss a single payment, and was all pumped up about 'yay, I'm building a credit history! I can co-exist with capitalism, this isn't so hard!'
Having basically paid off this loan flawlessly I lay plans for an actual small business and set up to take out a matching loan- basically, just keep the payments going, no problem here, right? I have credit now for at least amounts equal to what I'm already doing flawlessly?
not!
Turns out (nice of them to never once think of this or mention it) that you have to have a car for collateral- or equal amounts of money in a savings account. Now, I don't drive. I bike, and I walk. By choice. I don't think cars are a good thing- and I am too prone to be thinking about guitar effect box wiring diagrams when I ought to be watching the road and cannot control my brain and dumb it down to the point where I feel it is safe and justifiable for me to drive. Plus, cars are an expense not an asset- a big expense.
So as of today (and I do plan to sleep on it, and expect to feel less betrayed tomorrow) my capacities don't count for squat. I'm not talking to them about floating a big loan against earnings- even though I _could_ put together detailed cash flow statements and a complete business plan- and I'm not talking about even increasing the amount- it's actually about 4% less than what I effortlessly paid off the last time!
But to be a citizen of the corporate empire, you've got to _live_ your role. Living with no car and no cable TV and putting every penny you have TO WORK for you in materials and needed resources, being frugal and planning well and knowing your costs and expenditures- that doesn't even matter anymore! It is _meaningless_ compared to: do you have a car, so you can sign over the title because we no longer even _pay_ _attention_ to what _you_ are like, you are nothing but your role and your role is 'slacker consumer loser' and because you guys are all alike and screw up your finances, we will just blithely give you money at X% interest and repo your car if you mess up. So where's your car, serf? You need to be maintaining a car. No, stocks or bonds or owning land won't do- it has to be a car or have Mommy cosign it...
*SIGH* you know, I think the primary reason I'm 'processing' this kind of rage is because I did my part. I went along with the system, planned sensibly, fully lived up to my part of the deal and I really, honestly, thought that you could build a relationship with your bank, that you made a credit history and showed them that you were a responsible dude. If doing this means nothing, why the _fuck_ even try, is my question? I feel completely duped. I may as well have been totally irresponsible for all the difference it made.
I think that is the true dark side of the corporate empire- just as there are no individuals _within_ it (just the legal entity) there are no individuals _outside_ it either- there is nothing but classes of consumer, serfs, there is nothing personal about it at all and there's absolutely no point in even bothering to be anything, to strive or be loyal or be responsible, because you could be Mother Teresa combined with Thomas Edison combined with Linus Torvalds and at no point will you ever deal with a person who's evaluating your merits and worth- it will never be other than 'do you have a car?' *check* 'have you ever declared bankruptcy?' *check* and so on...
And that's your corporate empire in a nutshell- you DON'T EXIST. You're a role. The crazy irony of this is that it's the utter antithesis of the whole triumph-of-the-individual Randite thing, and yet those are the people who support corporate rule. Open your freaking eyes! Not until individual brilliance is _percieved_ by the corporate entity will that point of view make even a bit of sense.
"So, Mr. Rourke, you say you have a breathtakingly innovative architectural design, and in addition you are giving us extremely detailed information on the costs and cash flow of your building proposal. *promptly ignores all that* Please fill in subsection R, and be advised that you need to change the design because all our applicants construct building arches _this_ way..."
Welcome to the corporate empire. You don't exist. You are a classification- a _broad_ classification.
You should read more carefully. I wasn't picking words at random, Greg. Look again. I specifically said, a corporate executive who, beyond a reasonable doubt, had made the decision to deny AIDS drugs to a dying continent. Note the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' (discovery would have to really rest accountability with this person), and note 'DENY'. Find where it says 'fail to give away drugs for free just to be nice', you'll be looking a long time.
If there's a slippery slope it's you who's lost your footing. I'm seeing a situation where, far from simply not giving away loads of free medicine, some people (and I use the term loosely) at drug companies are on the one hand determining the cost of the medication based on rich US 'customers' (read: dying people) and on the other hand are willing to involve the US military and commerce department to _threaten_ poverty-stricken countries attempting to make the medicines _themselves_. We are not talking about failure to supply free medication here, we are talking about a concerted effort to condemn millions to death and _prohibit_ entire countries from saving their people through manufacturing the 'intellectual property' themselves.
It would be so easy to go with compulsory licensing for the duration of the crisis, and that would entirely undercut my argument about the terrorist. If such a country could (even only in absolute crisis) make its own drugs, there's no excuse for violence on the person of corporate executives.
It is only in the situation where countries are being prohibited through military and governmental force from making the medication to address their own intolerable crisis, and prohibited by the acts of a person making that decision, that I'd refuse to convict the terrorist. I feel that any person consciously making the decision to hold a continent at gunpoint, saying 'Drop everything, OFF with the drug production lines, call off your doctors! You get those drugs from US at first world prices or we send in the US army and impose trade sanctions destroying your country!'... given the situation, a person behaving like that is acting like a gangster and is abandoning the right to be treated like a human being. I think people like that should be locked up. If they can't be brought to justice, and someone is willing to sacrifice their own humanity to kill the person who's behaving like that and can't be brought to justice, I for one could not convict.
Hell, we're (the USA) living with a President now who is heartily in favor of taking people who act like gangsters and sociopaths and killing them off. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander- if we're expected to swallow that, why the hell must we behave like gangster-like corporate execs have a right to live? If we're killing off the dangers to society, let's track down some of the corporate execs who decide things like this, and kill them. I'd like to see equal killings: for every black inner city gang lord, let a lawyer-wielding corporate exec behaving like I've described be killed. The latter kind does more damage...
It is just as easy for either kind to be spared such harsh justice. For the gangster- duh, don't pull the trigger. For the exec- if your company appears to be obliging you to take such actions... freaking RESIGN! This is not rocket science, and the company is not God. Act AS IF you are responsible for your actions.
A 'free market' is not a community. Chicago school free market thinking assumes a state of uniform self-interest that is all supposed to add up to... something. Whatever it is, it certainly is not a community, because it pointedly refuses any social responsibility, much less obligation. In a way this is a sub-human point of view, socially inferior and more primitive than even some types of animal...
I suppose this can be chalked up to capitalist indoctrination, but don't overgeneralise- that is the same as saying that you are obviously a socialist and therefore support totalitarian states such as the Cold War USSR. The two aren't the same thing, and 'capitalist' is overgeneral for what you're reacting to. What the person is illustrating is Chicago School free market libertarian thinking, and that is not really capitalism- it's a sort of fascism, but a _non-specific_ fascism in which the ruler is not appointed or designated, but is simply the most ruthless competitor at any given time. Kind of like 'fascism without a plan'. Chile tried this out for a while (or had it tried on them) and was almost obliterated by it, but the crude simplicity of the concepts still appeal to some.
I'm just wondering one thing. You say, with every appearance of earnestness, "However, in a country without any means of protecting intellectual property, nobody would make the initial investment."
Are you stating that a scientist with AIDS would not attempt to save his own life unless he stands to gain a monopoly on the intellectual property?
Are you stating that a person with AIDS and enough money to fund such work would not spend the money that way unless they stood to make the money back with interest?
Are you stating that a friend of these two people would not lift a finger to help them without standing to gain in either intellectual property or monetary wealth?
...
Increasingly I suspect the best thing we could do is throw out _all_ IP and start over, even though this is hard to even imagine...
Yes- I realise it's a bit hard to imagine, but there are people who are that inhuman and hostile to society and civilisation. You'll also find them believing lots of odd things to justify viewpoints like 'millions of people dying is good because it leaves more for the winners' and 'millions of Africans dying is good because without industrialised agriculture and first world charity they would all starve to death'.
I would love to see some basic societal rules laid down and enforced. If you kill another person, you get put in jail as a menace to society. If you stubbornly assert that killing another person is good (even if you don't yourself do this) you might be committed to an institution, depending on who you choose to say it to, and how stubbornly you stick to the idea. I'd like to see similar consequences apply to those who stubbornly assert that killing millions of people is good- or, to be specific, that the prospering of an imaginary legal fiction is important enough to justify killing millions of people.
Maybe if you are so surprised at the New York Times running this information, you need to re-evaluate whether your own point of view is really defensible.
Looks to me like the New York Times is doing a terrific job, in the tradition of the Post breaking the Watergate story and learning more and more about just how nasty that situation really was. In this case, the New York Times appears to be figuring out that US-based multinational corporations may be getting us into a full-scale war against the rest of the world- and that US-based multinational corporations are condemning entire continents to death for inability to pay First World, hugely inflated prices.
Personally, I am proud of them for running this as a cover story- but I believe that, knowing what they know, they felt morally obliged, as I would, to get the word out. It is a desperate situation, and it's no longer acceptable to be disinterested- and taking up a collection to pay Merck $4.50 on 15 cents worth of medication is freaking missing the point! This expose does far more good- though it is only a band-aid.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny how Napster users are treated as criminals- but Puffy is supposedly okay! Be careful that your positions are internally consistent- on some level you're stubbornly defending Puffy's 'right' to earn money from rapping over other people's sampled music. It doesn't wash...
I don't agree with _everything_ Julian says, but being allowed (as a little struggling small player in the market) to put out 'loss leaders' is something I won't lightly give up. I can see how important it is to be able to put out open source work and develop a reputation for your free work, too. Well put.
Seriously, if you don't like inventing things just for the sake of solving the problems that arise, please get out of the way, take your toys and your capital and go home. There is a huge amount that can be done without capital. Most of Linux was done without capital. Gene research etc. is a very small percentage of the total invention and research done in the world...
Regarding napster or any P2P thing, all I can say is: please include my content in whatever peer-to-peer network is the latest greatest thing.
Here: www.besonic.com/chrisj
I am not essentially a consumer. I don't have time to keep in touch with the latest P2P developments- because my time is spent keeping in touch with what affects me as an artist.
It may interest you to know that as an artist using P2P as distribution, I have access to print-to-order stuff over the net, everything from T-shirts to mousepads to coffee mugs, all of which can have my GFX or whatever on it, and I can get paid for selling _real_ _tangible_ stuff... and the very latest development (ampcast.com, just the other day, announced this one) is that I can go to a _good_ hosting service with a fair contract and good artist relations and get Red Book Audio CDs burned to order over the net. This isn't ready yet but it's due by the end of March: I supply a CDR master (I can get professional quality as will quickly become apparent: this is what I do...) and they keep it on file, burn from it when a copy is ordered and keep an image of the CD for 30 days on HD in case of repeat orders to save on filing and handling hassles.
I can't begin to express how awesome this is: it's the first time I'm aware of that a musician could set up a burn-to-order fulfillment service (and not have to deal with juggling CDR blanks, inventory etc, or even taking orders) and be selling full-on, uncompressed, bit-for-bit untampered Red Book Audio CDs over the net, with color booklets and inserts! It's the epitome of the internet musician's wet dream, and should be a very nice business for Ampcast.
And it profoundly legitimises peer-to-peer: now, mp3s (or whatever) really _have_ a value. If they get into the hands of someone who wants a proper REAL CD of the music, now they can have one- and if nobody wants one, hey, nobody's out anything! Ampcast just stores one extra boring CD in the files, they're not out the cost of printing up thousands of the things, and I'm not out anything either, except the cost of the CD blank.
This year will see the final maturing of the complete product support network for the internet musician- with burn/print to order for everything from shirts to full-on audio CDs to fscking _mousepads_ we're practically at the level of 'Jackson 5' merchandising capabilities, without using the record industry. That is very, very exciting... now the only thing I'd like to see is print-to-order _posters_... that is just about the only thing left that isn't already covered!
Amazing, amazing... and P2P is the distribution network for publicising this stuff. None of it expects any sort of formal promotion efforts- it's all totally grassroots... which I think is no sort of accident, I think this is the natural reaction to increasing corporatization. People _want_ to discover their own stuff, even stuff that's 'no commercial potential' (as written on old Mothers Of Invention album covers), and having discovered it they'll buy tangible stuff to go with the free digital stuff they have, so long as the tangible stuff is good. What they won't do is be forced to pay money for totally intangible digital stuff that the corporate seller didn't have to pay anything to copy out- that's doomed, the future of making money fairly through IP is being able to offer stuff that is physical and real, that people might enjoy. (Italicisation of stuff in honor of Frank Zappa's typographical style and George Carlin)
Seriously, I always suspected but now I know that the future of being a small indie 'content producer' is to take complete advantage of everything that you can possibly give away or share for free- any digital files, etc, anything at all that you don't have to pay for actual materials, throw it out there! And then, find something that you can sell that is _tangible_ and physical, stuff to rumple and fetish as FZ put it. Shirts to wear, CDs to give nicer sounds and be hard-copy that can't be lost in HD crashes, mousepads to use (different band for every day of the week, why not?) mugs to hold COFFEE etc etc, _physical_ stuff.
Because the equalising effect of worldwide communications makes it possible... put it this way. I've been on besonic for a while, rarely if ever do any promoting, but for some reason lots of people in Sweden have listened to my music. Who knew? I have a track off an electronic album that is very warm and mellow called 'Wood Dragon': at one point it was one of the highest ranking easy listening tracks in Japan. Again, who knew? Supposing I saw that and decided to explore the easy-listening-electronic area some more for the people in Japan who enjoyed it, throwing in some woodflutes and obscure pentatonic intervals (I researched Japanese melodies for a later track and quite liked them). Supposing I made lovely high-fidelity audio CDs available, and stuff like shirts and mousepads, minimising English text and sticking to elegant graphic designs since I know that it's Japan which was showing an interest in the stuff. I could do quite well that way- not getting rich, but paying some bills and buying more synths etc- by doing _good_ _work_ and selling only tangible, real stuff. This is real. The future is now...
So support the P2P networks! This is not about greedy consumers wanting stuff for free. It's about communication and _information_ and I promise you, as an artist, I couldn't GET demographic information like that out of the record companies. The only alternative to P2P and artist independence is the record companies (and other forms of distribution controls and let me tell you a little story... I hang out on a mastering engineer list- and recently one of the top guys came out with a chilling story. He'd worked with an artist for weeks to get the ideal mastering for the artist's CD, testing it in actual clubs, working like mad to balance it just perfectly so it was the best it could possibly be. Then a new A&R guy was assigned to the artist, and against my engineer friend's AND the artist's wishes, decided to assign the mastering to another mastering guy: which is known as a 'shoot-out'. Usually the label wants 'louder, brighter, more' from such a situation, and it's gotten to the point where mastering engineers are _ruining_ the sounds of records just because the labels are _demanding_ that the new record's gotta be louder than the next guy. My friend, I believe, did a terrific job on the CD- just what the ARTIST wanted- but it is _always_ possible to make a CD louder by making it sound worse. And I think that's just what's going to happen, and I pity the artist, because all their work is going to be butchered by a mastering job that squashes it into extreme loudness and ruins the tone- it probably won't even sound as good in the clubs! All because of a new A&R guy who outranks both the original mastering guy and the artist. It's anybody's guess as to whether the artist's career can survive releasing a CD that sounds like crap- you don't get many chances in the music business, and the new mastering engineer has a vested interest in making his mastering sound as _different_ as possible from the original one that took so much painstaking work.
Now, all the mastering guys are absolutely miserable about this general state of affairs, it's hurting the industry, it's hurting the sound of modern releases, and there seems to be no way to get the record companies to stop doing it.
But now, indie content producers can put out full quality audio CDs and none of them are forced to do any such thing- they have _total_ freedom to do whatever their artistic judgement dictates, with the result succeeding or failing purely on its merits- the 'word' of it getting out primarily through word-of-mouth and P2P. THAT is why artists desperately need P2P to thrive and continue- because without it, it is less and less likely that the consumer will even be allowed to hear their art, because already if they have to go through existing channels, the consumer IS NOT allowed to hear their art until label suits have specified which songs, albums etc will be allowed to be released, until A&R guys have dictated the use of mastering engineers counter to the artist's wishes and specifically told the mastering guy to ruin the sound to make it louder louder louder, until corporate execs have decided which markets they're even going to sell the CD in and which markets they are not going to allow it to be available at all.
Only then does the consumer get to 'choose' what they want.
Free market, hell!
Maybe you want to take that up with David Boies, whose argument is that this NONCOMMERCIAL copying is not illegal (read the law!). Given that, we've got cops acting as the private police force of big corporations. The other explanation is that in Belgium, noncommercial copying is illegal. The other other explanation is that these people being raided are actually running businesses in which they are burning CDs (perhaps of CDs that have not been released by the record companies in Belgium, and won't be: see DVD region control practices, not everything necessarily gets to Belgium) and selling them.
You're right but it's still a stereotype. You can't let THESE guys define what the American way is, just because they jump up and down blathering on about it. A lot of americans pursue other ways. I think FDR's "New Deal" was the American Way. I think the Four Freedoms are the American Way. I don't accept that greed and economic destruction of the weak are the American Way. Did you know that one of FDR's Four Freedoms that WWII was fought over was freedom from want? That another was freedom from fear? Compare with the Microsoft Way. You should also read Madison in Federalist #10 about the evils of faction and the need to put pressure on the largest factions so they don't just plain steamroller all the others. THAT is the American Way to me, seeing these problems and deciding to try and improve the situation, even if imperfectly, but to go ahead and make the effort- who cares if you aren't guaranteed success, TRY anyway! That to me is the American Way. That is what I practice, and sometimes it works, and when it works it's great :) when it doesn't, at least I tried...
Interestingly, just before reading the article I'd read another article on CNet claiming that 95% of tech businesses are random organizations that need to develop a habit of earning trust by being more open and KEEPING THEIR PROMISES... I think this may be part of the reason why I literally laughed out loud reading Jim Allchin's remarks. Poor silly fellow... he does not have the public relations leverage he thinks he has. Now, if Microsoft had been telling the truth and being honest with people all these years, it might be different, but who doesn't know they lie and even fake stuff in court, by now?
How nice. Will MS follow the rules too, or will they fabricate video evidence in open court again?
Seriously, listen to yourself for a second. You sound just a _bit_ like you're wearing a tinfoil helmet... the fact is, Microsoft is a public company with truly staggering expenses and an entire culture _based_ on geometric expansion. It doesn't matter _how_ much money they have (and which set of figures are you looking at?), they're not spending it any slower.
I honestly, seriously believe that if Microsoft is absolved of all wrongdoing by the courts their next move is to run themselves into massive debt through uncontrolled expenditures and implode. It's possible this would destroy them a lot better than a court-ordered breakup. Steve Ballmer agrees with me and has made public statements about wanting to alter Microsoft's very culture into more of a culture of frugality (ha! not!). Who are you going to believe, me and Ballmer, or some PR flack feeding you nonsense about MS invincibility? That's what they're _paid_ to do...
Someone mentioned SM57s in an earlier thread, dismissing them as 'toy' mics, colored and useless for professional use. Um. *g* apart from the fact that they're still a classic snare mic and general drumkit mic, their distinctive coloration has always been hugely popular at all levels, right up to the top: on the Division Bell Pink Floyd tour, the backing singers used SM51 condenser mics, but David Gilmour chose to sing through a SM58- described as a 'regular' SM58. Not only that- both Gary Wallis's and Nick Mason's snare drums were miked with SM57s!
It's like that all over, now. The hottest new compressor available is not a $3000 tube optoelectronic recreation of vintage compressors- it's a little 1/3 rack space unit by a little company called FMR Audio and it's named the Really Nice Compressor, or RNC- running a purely analog signal path, but digital circuitry to cascade as many as three compression staged to specify the control gain in SuperNice mode, this compressor is _the_ hot gain reduction device out there right now- and it's $199 MSRP.
Give a person one of these, a couple SM57s, impedance matching transformers and either a half-decent PC soundcard or any old Powermac, and they will be able to record an acoustic event with sound quality that is more than acceptable. They probably cannot afford _really_ good digital compression, but the RNC will easily beat any but the most top-of-the-line digital compression and feed the soundcard or powermac with the most ideal signal it could ask for, leaving little or nothing to do in the digital domain- unless you want to, of course, and then it'd provide a great launching-point for entertaining digital effects and radical sounds.
You can go the other direction as well, away from digital effects and sounds. Check "B17 Flying Fortress" or "Supermarine Spitfire" at www.besonic.com/chrisj. I happen to _like_ the big-studio sound. Some of the techniques used to get that are very clean, pure signal paths and good components inside the equipment. You can do that at home, too, and I did, including the heavy modding of my 20-bit ADAT because it sounded thin. As a result, "B17 Flying Fortress" has a bigness and spaciousness that you cannot get outside of a big studio- except, surprise! I got it in my apartment, and so can you, if you like that approach. You can have ANYTHING you want now, if you're willing to do the work, learn a lot, and push the envelope. Sometimes the guys selling the equipment aren't the most honest sources of information about what decisions you should make...
I see this as analogous to Linux itself. It is no different from saying, 'You can't have a really proper operating system unless you pay a lot of money for it and have a large company supporting it'. The truth is, such performance happens because of _reasons_: and just as a bunch of programmers can get together and cooperate working on an OS, sound engineers and audio tinkerers can get together and work on gear that will bring big-studio performance to apartments and basements. It started with the Tom Scholz 'Rockman' and the Shure SM58, is continuing with the RNC compressor, and I think the market is actually getting even _better_ what with the ability of people to find out about stuff like the RNC without having to go through a lot of industry middlemen.
You can even do _room_ treatment for super cheap, and I'm not talking about 'dead-room' stuff like putting up egg crates (useless) or covering everything with blankets (yucky dead high end, doesn't help lower room modes much). Here's what I did: stumbled across a box of furnace air filters, realised 'hey, this is a 25x16x2 cardboard box filled with fibreglass, lacking only the front and back face to make it a sort of weak bass trap!', got about $100 of foam-core art board (chosen for lightness, rigidity, and reflectiveness in the high frequencies) and made lots and lots of plain boxes, reflective at higher frequencies, moderately absorptive with resistive damping at low frequencies, and innocuous-looking- and put them up all around my studio room and miking room. The 2" spacing out from the walls did great things for flutter echo- there's a test called the 'clap test' where you clap, making the room go 'rinnng', and the difference from these cheap things is NOT subtle. I don't know or care how much better professional room treatment would be since _real_ diffusers would be hundreds of dollars for just _one_ unit smaller than the dozen I made- the point is, it's not about the money. It's about understanding the principle, the technology, and _using_ that to better your situation. And yes, you can even do proper room treatment with diffusers and real bass traps cheaply, you only have to be willing to DIY! And make more of the treatment because it'll not be fully as effective as the kilobuck stuff. No sweat...
By the way, if the guitar tones on those tracks sounded nice enough that you _want_ 'em, I'm just on the verge of dropping a big chunk of loan money on a project that will put me in the 'manufacturer' camp. I'm going to be building guitar preamps that are as good at their job as the RNC is at its- and they'll be no more expensive. I think I can really beat the crap out of the sound quality of Line 6 'POD' products, musically, at the cost of not being able to get tones quite as muddy and rumbly as the POD can. When I have prototypes built that really reflect the final product rather than (as of now) just being proof of concept for the technologies, I'll be making mp3s available that can be compared to the mp3s you can easily get of all the digital amp modelling effect devices like the POD.
Even if my tones aren't what people are madly looking for, there's going to be others out there, it'll be just a question of education. If you just go to the store and buy what they tell you, your sound will probably correlate to the amount of money you spent (including on engineering lessons, obviously!). If you use the Net and your brain and the resources of your community and are willing to work hard and DIY, you'll be able to put out sonics that compete with _anybody_ at virtually any price point. That's not going to go away, now. It's a factor of networking and accessibility of information of all types. In 2001 and beyond, _expertise_ is the key factor, because you're not confined to just what some company is willing to sell you. Ten years ago you couldn't go look at a RNC online and buy one- and they couldn't get their message to you without going through distributors who'd rather be selling Sony. Things are different now, get used to it, make use of it...
It is possible that, doing all these things, especially _charging_ most musicians for timely service and hosting, mp3.com will not roll over and die, and I suppose there's some merit to that. But they are already doing the things that so outrage slashdotters when they happen to, for instance, domain names, and I don't think they deserve any more artists. Do business with them if you want, but read your contract because it does matter, and consider giving your music hosting to a smaller, better competitor like besonic.com or ampcast.com.
I mean, who _else_ would be so likely to accept the notion that Free Trade means, "Ever lose your job to a guy in Korea who works 18 hours a day in leg shackles for a bowl of rice, because he's cheaper to hire than you? YOU WILL!"
One thing Marx missed, however- he's assuming an _industrial_ proletariat. This is railroad-era thinking: this is a condemnation of capitalism in which the barriers for entry are as high as, say, a software company wanting to sell a new word processor. When Marx was writing this stuff, access to industrialisation was severely limited, networking was severely restricted, and your marketing was entirely a matter of brick-and-mortar installations, a whole network that had to be supported. This is why small craftsmen were ground under the wheels.
2001 turns out to have eBay and UPS and Napster and Slashdot and Linux (as examples of these _types_ of services). Marx would've loved Linux: it's controlled by the proletariat and gives all the tools of virtual industrialization to the proletariat. This is a really big difference from the industrial-age world Marx knew. How big, remains to be seen. Clearly, the bourgeoisie still retains a lot of power to put up barriers to entry- we see this most easily with Microsoft trying to technically produce obstacles for Linux, because they are unusually aggressive for bourgeoisie. But it's also seen in the consolidation of vast media empires that control what we hear and see for news and entertainment. Yet, at the same time, the foundations are crumbling, and individuals, artisans, craftsmen such as Marx talks about, begin to have an unprecedented ability to network with clients, customers, helpers across the globe, and the ability to interact AS IF they were industrial titans, in some cases.
An example: suppose you make cars, and you need a certain steel bracket. Traditionally, you need to order 100,000 of these brackets from somebody, or invest in the heavy machinery to fabricate them yourself. Either way, someone makes lots of brackets and keeps them in warehouses and they sell, or not. But with computerised order fulfillment systems (not to mention computerised fabricate-to-order systems!) you can order 100. Possibly in the future you can order 10- or 1- without nasty price hikes. Compare the history of record and CD pressing with mp3.com's pioneering 'DAM' CD system, which is now widely imitated and improved upon, and which allows fabrication of _single_ CDs for order fulfillment- or the history of T-shirt and mug printing with CafePress, which likewise allows fabrication of _single_ items for order fulfillment.
These issues _are_ the foundation of the industrial age: both ability and necessity to mass produce. Now the ability is still there- but due to the ever-increasing sophistication of the machinery, the necessity is not- which is enormously significant.
If you want the world forced into a Communist Revolution for good or ill, keep on encouraging barriers to entry, 'free trade' and the ability of large corporations to exert economic leverage against smaller players and/or individuals. Down with Napster, down with eBay, down with libraries, and everybody aboard the corporate ferryboat- which will not wait, and has no stops because you've no business choosing where you want to go!
If you want Marx to be a footnote to history, support every form of decentralisation and breaking of the barriers to entry that you can. Consider the right of a crappy garage musician to put mp3s on Napster for free as MORE important than the right of Britney Spears to earn record companies billions. Support Linux and open source and fight Microsoft's efforts to create a world where Windows is required for most internet tasks (Active Directory, etc ad infinitum). If Apple tries the same stuff, fight them too!
The only way to _make_ Marx irrelevant and useless is to _remove_ the problems he identifies, or at least have a good hard try at it. If you decide he's a creep and do everything opposite to what he demands, you are only creating the pressing need for just such a revolution as he agitates for- and that might not be the best thing. It's better to say 'No revolution here today, thank you- now here's what we'll do instead' and GO AFTER the problems he correctly identifies. Do that and all the ranting about bourgeoisie starts to look foolish. Marx is like Linux, fighting him and what he believes in only makes him stronger...
So there _is_ an argument against running the bonsaikitten site in its current form, with no disclaimer- the argument that people are _such_ idiots that, guaranteed, some idiot is gonna try to bounce a kitten, and kill or maim it.
And yeah, there are worse things that happen in the world, but why _bait_ idiots to be idiots? Most idiots don't come up with ideas _that_ bad on their own: they're baited into it as a joke. It's not good judgement to joke that way. All the talk about Klein bottles is one thing, as it's too difficult for an idiot to prepare the glassware and the obvious result is the idiot writes to BonsaiKitten and wants to buy a finished one. But the bouncing thing? Idiots are going to _do_ that, and that's a shame, and it's not necessary. I think there's even going to be a few idiots who keep trying harder and harder when it doesn't work. Idiots suck...
Well... I'm a cat fanatic, and so logically I _ought_ to be offended. But on the other hand, I find 'Dysfunctional Family Circus' hysterically funny, and that is at least as sick if not more so. Therefore, I am forced to accept that bonsaikitten.com is funny too- if melonheaded mutant children are funny, then so are cube-shaped kittens. ;)
In addition, it can be hard specialised work being a _plumber_, or a toilet maintenance expert, or a long distance truck driver, or a pallet loader at UPS. Nobody behaves like these people are deities, but they sure are useful.
In my way I am an artist. I can honestly say that I work at it as hard as any top-of-the-line plumber, or UPS pallet loader. There's a lot that goes into it, and it costs a lot for equipment, and requires some pretty serious dedication to learn the craft. I think it is absolutely absurd to expect to be treated like Picasso just for being _an_ artist (thing about Picasso is, not only was he an absolute virtuoso but he kept it up his entire life), but I do expect to get as much respect as a UPS pallet loader or long distance trucker- and, in turn, extend it instead of getting all haughty and Mick Jagger about it ;)
The fact is, any artist who's any good either is a bit of an idiot savant or put a lot of work into their craft or both. I admit to both. But I only want the _chance_ to earn respect over my lifetime as a music creator (not 'career', music business careers are about 2 1/2 years now if you're lucky).
That isn't the same thing as saying I want the chance to earn _money_. If digital copying means almost nobody makes or is forced to spend lots of money as a musician, I can accept that. But in order to have the chance to earn respect I need to continue to be able to produce digital music myself and have people download it. That's what's at risk now- the danger is, the content controls will lock down so much that people won't be _allowed_ to listen to what I'm able to produce unless I go through channels. That's bad.
Let me put it this way: I have music at besonic.com/chrisj for free downloading. There's a lot there- put a lot of effort into it because it's what I love to do and I can't get music like what I want out of the major labels anyhow, gotta make it myself.
That said, there comes a point where I don't even care if people go listen to this music- what I am appreciating is a situation where people can go listen to it, if they like, without costing me anything. I can't maintain a distribution network that would put physical CDs in people's hands all over the world for pennies or for free- the CDs that I have made are white elephants, physical media isn't as popular as it used to be, it's a losing deal. Internet distribution is so much better because it's so much more flexible...
So, my primary concern here is not to get better access to major label stuff (I don't even care- it basically sucks, who wants it?) or to gain equal access for my stuff. I'm perfectly happy to have a situation where my stuff can only thrive on its own merits, always out-publicised by other stuff. What I don't want is to be outflanked- don't want to lose the distribution media (redbook CD audio, mp3, internet file distribution) that I _do_ have available at this time.
I consider that a very serious risk- after all, every single one of those taken-for-granted technologies is under attack, up to and including redbook CD audio (see BMG's attempts to introduce a copy protected version). So from my perspective, I totally, completely agree that the music industry wants to be able to force people to buy their products and only their products. As an independent musician, studio owner, recording and mastering engineer not affiliated with the RIAA, I really don't like the idea of the general public being forced _not_ to buy/use _my_ products. Call that capitalism? *spit*
It's a 'boiling the frog' problem- do it slowly and steadily enough and the general public doesn't really notice, particularly when they're not told. The general public does not, for instance, understand exactly what 'music CDRs' are, or why they are more expensive, where the money goes, why some newer players may refuse to play music off 'data CDRs'. None of this is done in daylight- it's done in scheming silence as a fait accompli. It's done through totalitarian processes rather than capitalistic processes, and the intended result resembles state socialism as practiced by the USSR rather than capitalism.
It's funny how much respect I've gained for capitalism once I figured out we Americans don't have it. I'd like to see us have more of it, in addition to the socialist tinge that moderates our government. There's no freaking point in proceeding with a corporate oligarchy totalitarian state and then grudgingly slapping a coat of social-policy socialism onto it to cover up the uglier bits. If we expect to be considered 'capitalist' by history we'd better shape up and start considering the nature of power and where it settles, and take steps to establish that we do have something at least vaguely resembling a free market.
I'm here to tell you that a world in which the only way you can distribute music content to consumers is through corporate-controlled encrypted formats backed by law is not even vaguely resembling a free market from where I'm standing. Please do everything possible to prevent things ever getting to that state, even to the point of boycotting the RIAA labels and intentionally pirating their wares to injure their profit, which is being used against capitalism and for totalitarianism.
I won't be doing that part because I have my hands full simply taking care of my side of things- upgrading my studio, producing music intended to be circulated freely, keeping informed of how things are in the music business. But because of the direction I see things going, I have to say I completely support and respect anyone who's actually trying to use music piracy as a weapon to hurt the RIAA labels. Hey, name one other weapon we have? I don't see any other defense against them, and just because it's not being fought in _your_ trenches doesn't mean it's not a war.
The reason RMS is held in high regard is because he personally, consistently, and repeatedly acts against the zero-sum concept wherever it presents itself. He began doing this when a LISP machine company gutted the MIT computer lab, imposing zero-sum conditions and blocking communication, and Stallman personally and singlehandedly reverse-engineered huge amounts of IP simply to give them to the 'loser' in the equation. He invented the GPL and specifically designed it so the single overriding requirement it imposes is that you may not make GPLed software zero-sum! It must always be left as an unlimited resource that cannot be seized as property by any 'player'. He continues to follow this purpose in everything he does, and won't bend an inch to accomodate those who want to make things more into 'winners' and 'losers'. To him, you are either part of the free society cooperating completely and socially, or you're in the way and need to stop being in the way, or be run over. If you're in the way you're not a competitor- you're a WALL. You're a locked door and the point is to open you, not beat you...
Are you (heh, 'WindowsTroll'. didn't notice that at first) following any of this? It's difficult to open a mind that is completely set in its ways. Whether or not you're following this, it can be summed up as, "No, that is not the way things are." Zero-sum and social ways of doing things coexist. They have _always_ coexisted, and your argument that social ways don't exist is just plain wrong- as wrong as a contrasting argument that competition and zero-sum could be completely eliminated.
In the event that your arguing itself is zero-sum, and the expectation that you'll just plain deny what I'm saying, I would have to say- fine, believe what you want. There's room in the world for your way of thinking. However, you are not entitled to be treated as if your way of thinking was the ONLY way of thinking- because there is also room in the world for cooperation at all levels, up to the very highest and down to the simplest level- and whether you like it or not, people are going to go on cooperating without your approval.
Next, a special exclusive in which tobacco company execs shock everyone by suggesting smoking isn't that bad for you really!
You want to add to that, for CPUs you have: intel compatible, AND for OSes you have: Windows?
Why, for God's sake? Is this an expression of faith that consolidation of markets doesn't really happen except for Microsoft, nVidia and Creative Labs? Leave MacOS hardware and software in the perfectly good niche they're in. Why screw that up?
Background- last year, I took out a bank loan, using my folks as a co-sign, for some recording equipment. Got that, everything was fine, did not miss a single payment, and was all pumped up about 'yay, I'm building a credit history! I can co-exist with capitalism, this isn't so hard!'
Having basically paid off this loan flawlessly I lay plans for an actual small business and set up to take out a matching loan- basically, just keep the payments going, no problem here, right? I have credit now for at least amounts equal to what I'm already doing flawlessly?
not!
Turns out (nice of them to never once think of this or mention it) that you have to have a car for collateral- or equal amounts of money in a savings account. Now, I don't drive. I bike, and I walk. By choice. I don't think cars are a good thing- and I am too prone to be thinking about guitar effect box wiring diagrams when I ought to be watching the road and cannot control my brain and dumb it down to the point where I feel it is safe and justifiable for me to drive. Plus, cars are an expense not an asset- a big expense.
So as of today (and I do plan to sleep on it, and expect to feel less betrayed tomorrow) my capacities don't count for squat. I'm not talking to them about floating a big loan against earnings- even though I _could_ put together detailed cash flow statements and a complete business plan- and I'm not talking about even increasing the amount- it's actually about 4% less than what I effortlessly paid off the last time!
But to be a citizen of the corporate empire, you've got to _live_ your role. Living with no car and no cable TV and putting every penny you have TO WORK for you in materials and needed resources, being frugal and planning well and knowing your costs and expenditures- that doesn't even matter anymore! It is _meaningless_ compared to: do you have a car, so you can sign over the title because we no longer even _pay_ _attention_ to what _you_ are like, you are nothing but your role and your role is 'slacker consumer loser' and because you guys are all alike and screw up your finances, we will just blithely give you money at X% interest and repo your car if you mess up. So where's your car, serf? You need to be maintaining a car. No, stocks or bonds or owning land won't do- it has to be a car or have Mommy cosign it...
*SIGH* you know, I think the primary reason I'm 'processing' this kind of rage is because I did my part. I went along with the system, planned sensibly, fully lived up to my part of the deal and I really, honestly, thought that you could build a relationship with your bank, that you made a credit history and showed them that you were a responsible dude. If doing this means nothing, why the _fuck_ even try, is my question? I feel completely duped. I may as well have been totally irresponsible for all the difference it made.
I think that is the true dark side of the corporate empire- just as there are no individuals _within_ it (just the legal entity) there are no individuals _outside_ it either- there is nothing but classes of consumer, serfs, there is nothing personal about it at all and there's absolutely no point in even bothering to be anything, to strive or be loyal or be responsible, because you could be Mother Teresa combined with Thomas Edison combined with Linus Torvalds and at no point will you ever deal with a person who's evaluating your merits and worth- it will never be other than 'do you have a car?' *check* 'have you ever declared bankruptcy?' *check* and so on...
And that's your corporate empire in a nutshell- you DON'T EXIST. You're a role. The crazy irony of this is that it's the utter antithesis of the whole triumph-of-the-individual Randite thing, and yet those are the people who support corporate rule. Open your freaking eyes! Not until individual brilliance is _percieved_ by the corporate entity will that point of view make even a bit of sense.
"So, Mr. Rourke, you say you have a breathtakingly innovative architectural design, and in addition you are giving us extremely detailed information on the costs and cash flow of your building proposal. *promptly ignores all that* Please fill in subsection R, and be advised that you need to change the design because all our applicants construct building arches _this_ way..."
Welcome to the corporate empire. You don't exist. You are a classification- a _broad_ classification.
If there's a slippery slope it's you who's lost your footing. I'm seeing a situation where, far from simply not giving away loads of free medicine, some people (and I use the term loosely) at drug companies are on the one hand determining the cost of the medication based on rich US 'customers' (read: dying people) and on the other hand are willing to involve the US military and commerce department to _threaten_ poverty-stricken countries attempting to make the medicines _themselves_. We are not talking about failure to supply free medication here, we are talking about a concerted effort to condemn millions to death and _prohibit_ entire countries from saving their people through manufacturing the 'intellectual property' themselves.
It would be so easy to go with compulsory licensing for the duration of the crisis, and that would entirely undercut my argument about the terrorist. If such a country could (even only in absolute crisis) make its own drugs, there's no excuse for violence on the person of corporate executives.
It is only in the situation where countries are being prohibited through military and governmental force from making the medication to address their own intolerable crisis, and prohibited by the acts of a person making that decision, that I'd refuse to convict the terrorist. I feel that any person consciously making the decision to hold a continent at gunpoint, saying 'Drop everything, OFF with the drug production lines, call off your doctors! You get those drugs from US at first world prices or we send in the US army and impose trade sanctions destroying your country!'... given the situation, a person behaving like that is acting like a gangster and is abandoning the right to be treated like a human being. I think people like that should be locked up. If they can't be brought to justice, and someone is willing to sacrifice their own humanity to kill the person who's behaving like that and can't be brought to justice, I for one could not convict.
Hell, we're (the USA) living with a President now who is heartily in favor of taking people who act like gangsters and sociopaths and killing them off. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander- if we're expected to swallow that, why the hell must we behave like gangster-like corporate execs have a right to live? If we're killing off the dangers to society, let's track down some of the corporate execs who decide things like this, and kill them. I'd like to see equal killings: for every black inner city gang lord, let a lawyer-wielding corporate exec behaving like I've described be killed. The latter kind does more damage...
It is just as easy for either kind to be spared such harsh justice. For the gangster- duh, don't pull the trigger. For the exec- if your company appears to be obliging you to take such actions... freaking RESIGN! This is not rocket science, and the company is not God. Act AS IF you are responsible for your actions.
I suppose this can be chalked up to capitalist indoctrination, but don't overgeneralise- that is the same as saying that you are obviously a socialist and therefore support totalitarian states such as the Cold War USSR. The two aren't the same thing, and 'capitalist' is overgeneral for what you're reacting to. What the person is illustrating is Chicago School free market libertarian thinking, and that is not really capitalism- it's a sort of fascism, but a _non-specific_ fascism in which the ruler is not appointed or designated, but is simply the most ruthless competitor at any given time. Kind of like 'fascism without a plan'. Chile tried this out for a while (or had it tried on them) and was almost obliterated by it, but the crude simplicity of the concepts still appeal to some.
Are you stating that a scientist with AIDS would not attempt to save his own life unless he stands to gain a monopoly on the intellectual property?
Are you stating that a person with AIDS and enough money to fund such work would not spend the money that way unless they stood to make the money back with interest?
Are you stating that a friend of these two people would not lift a finger to help them without standing to gain in either intellectual property or monetary wealth?
Increasingly I suspect the best thing we could do is throw out _all_ IP and start over, even though this is hard to even imagine...
I would love to see some basic societal rules laid down and enforced. If you kill another person, you get put in jail as a menace to society. If you stubbornly assert that killing another person is good (even if you don't yourself do this) you might be committed to an institution, depending on who you choose to say it to, and how stubbornly you stick to the idea. I'd like to see similar consequences apply to those who stubbornly assert that killing millions of people is good- or, to be specific, that the prospering of an imaginary legal fiction is important enough to justify killing millions of people.
Looks to me like the New York Times is doing a terrific job, in the tradition of the Post breaking the Watergate story and learning more and more about just how nasty that situation really was. In this case, the New York Times appears to be figuring out that US-based multinational corporations may be getting us into a full-scale war against the rest of the world- and that US-based multinational corporations are condemning entire continents to death for inability to pay First World, hugely inflated prices.
Personally, I am proud of them for running this as a cover story- but I believe that, knowing what they know, they felt morally obliged, as I would, to get the word out. It is a desperate situation, and it's no longer acceptable to be disinterested- and taking up a collection to pay Merck $4.50 on 15 cents worth of medication is freaking missing the point! This expose does far more good- though it is only a band-aid.