Like "You can't work as a programmer on a project involving all of the following (feature X, feature Y, feature Z) for four months." You can go to a competitor and use _part_ of what you've learned on this big complex cutting edge product, but the nonco gets really specific and is obviously designed to stop you from walking off with the WHOLE project in one big lump. Anyone trying to acquire your team will have to either sit on their hands for four months, or shuffle the whole team with managers programming and programmers testing and testers managing, or pick only _part_ of the feature set and do only that.
That would hold up in court, but any of the loopholes results in an inefficiency- the 'raider' would either not be delivering the full feature set, or would be immediately shuffling jobs and having everyone working away from their core areas, or would pay the people to sit on their hands for four months. However they _are_ allowed to try any of the three, and this is why they can legitimately be forbidden from snatching up the whole damn project team and saying 'Cool- finish it and _we'll_ ship it.'
It would only be persuasive if it turned out that the MS noncompete agreements were really specific. Like, "You cannot work programming groupware that includes email AND messaging AND scheduling ON a GUI and FOR the Windows platform FOR six months".
Something like that, the noncompete (specifically written for each employee, mind you) would have real teeth.
"You cannot work for our competitors for a year!" is worthless. So it's a question of, were the Microsoft lawyers being sharp when they wrote these up, or were they being arrogant? If they were being arrogant and wrote them in general terms or anything resembling boilerplate terms then the noncompetes are worthless.
The key points in successfully enforcing a noncompete are scope and time. Saying "you can't work at all for a year" is ridiculous. Saying "you can't work at all IN YOUR FIELD for a year" is considered equally ridiculous. What are these guys supposed to do, wait tables?
The key points apply with, say, sales staff or whatever. If a sales guy for a regular company is leaving and has a noncompete, one good way to draft the noncompete is to say that (for instance) the guy can't take with him the clients within a ten mile radius for six months. After that he can try for 'em but he can't go straight to a competing company and drop by the clients going "Hi, me again. We'll still be covering your needs only you may notice a different name on the trucks".
The limitations (10 mile radius, six months) are what make the noncompete have serious teeth. Big arrogant noncompetes are routinely considered invalid contracts. Sure the guy signed it but the court would laugh at the company making it. I think it's simply the threat of MS lawyers and the _costs_ of litigation that have stomped this startup company. That is bad too, but don't confuse it with 'the noncompete forbade them from working for the startup!'. There's a great deal of case law, apparently, to show that overblown noncompetes don't even work and get thrown out by the court. If you want to draft a noncompete that does actually work, you limit things quite drastically and leave loopholes that you can still compete with even if the departing person takes advantage of the loophole (such as outside the ten mile radius- fair enough- or waiting six months before going after his former clients, by which time you've solidified their relationship with a new sales guy, right?)
In other words, the current situation is heavily monopolised and doesn't represent a market in any normal sense. _Any_ additional player getting a larger share legitimises the very concept of 'additional player'.
The more OSX out there, the more plausible the concept of 'well I have an x86 already, how about I run Linux?'. The more Linux out there, the more plausible the concept of 'if I'm already not running Windows maybe I want something real slick'. Sort of a mutual feedback thing.
If your list is tainted, possibly because its opt-in procedures allow or once allowed abuses, why not throw it away and begin assembling a new one? It sounds like your list is tainted.
Re:Commercial vs. Political Speech
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Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 2
Is email even an appropriate way to do such a thing? I think it's possible that the uses of these various internet resources are up for re-evaluation. Currently, the mailing list is considered unarguably fine, and there's an expectation that under certain circumstances you can slam strangers with email- email 10 strangers and it's not even an issue, email 10,000 and it may still be seen as legit, email 10,000,000 and it suddenly becomes spam and is obviously out of line. The question is, where's the line?
Maybe the future is more about web sites, boards like Slashdot etc. and less about 'commercial email' or even 'this is very important to you' email.
I know that if every single political fringe, environmental activist group, union, whatever that I AGREED WITH AND SUPPORTED felt free to send me email whenever something happened in the world that interested me, I would STILL BE BURIED in email and my email account would be unusable. I can't overemphasise this. It's not about my consent or interest in what's being sent, it is about the fact that the world contains more information than I can process, and always will. In this light, mass mailing of _any_ sort is a disturbing mechanism to me, because it always keeps the potential to go right off the scale and become impossible volume.
I think it's time to redefine email as 'private communications only'. There's no way to consider it a public resource without causing trouble. I can have an email account on my web page about Stratocasters, but this doesn't mean that everyone who sells Stratocasters can proceed to email me about what _they_ want to sell. The trick with the internet is that one aspect to the loss of privacy means that sellers can research and identify potential buyers: in the future ten thousand people a day can research what I really want and need, and then email me entirely personal letters asking me to buy something that I specifically want. That doesn't change the fact that ten thousand emails a day is still impossible, unmanageable... the ability of the world to produce RELEVANT information is far greater than the ability of a person to process it.
THAT is why spam is a crime. In a peculiar way it is more akin to rape than theft. "You _are_ going to love my special offer now! Your attention belongs to me now. Don't try and get away!"
The trouble with that position is, it assumes there has to be cost involved with spamming. As long as it's possible to hijack someone else's account for spamming, or use a throwaway account while paying a flat rate, the cost is effectively dumped onto the recipients. That is the whole _point_...
Ahhhh... that would be _such_ a fitting use of the technology. It would do many people good to have their corporate media forcibly turned off. Please, if this ever becomes possible, somebody do it- turn off _all_ the TVs >:)
mp3pro doesn't have mastering controls to match LAME. LAME has a control based on ATH level that I call 'ambience suppression level', and if you know what you're doing and can handle the HF and LF rolloffs artistically you can get _much_ more of the essence of the sound encoded than with Frauhofer encoders, including a far superior 'take' on the reverberant field that is not totally collapsed and obliterated, while still keeping it in balance with foreground sounds.
Why do I say this when it's not in the LAME docs? Because LAME is open source, I needed it, and I hacked it in.
It's that simple. (I've tried to interest the coders in this but they don't 'get it': I think mastering engineers will be a lot more interested.) Let me put it this way- as long as there are mastering engineers and studio types willing to struggle with the code enough to look after _their_ interests, LAME will beat whatever Fraunhofer comes up with, because Fraunhofer is all computer geek researchers- I see them going for a 'one size fits all' consumer encoder, and this is totally unacceptable and wrong for professional use.
And encoding music into mp3 or similar lossy formats _is_ a professional task: in the field of music it is so competitive that anything a band or artist can do to give themselves an edge _will_ be done. If LAME operated by a real mastering engineer using serious reference speakers and adjusted to let the soul of the song through beats the quality level of mp3pro operated by the artist... then the guy using LAME will score more downloads, get more attention and money, sell more CDs when his music _sounds_ _better_ at the same bitrate, and the guy using mp3pro and coloring his sound with a preset compressor that isn't tailored for the individual song will _lose_.
This is such an obvious development, and it is totally favoring the 'open source' side of things, because there are not enough 'mastering engineers', even wannabes, to tailor a commercial product to them- yet the work they do can outperform what you'll get from preset compressors. It's not the easiest skill to acquire but if you can do serious mastering on CDs you have the skillset to know what to do when you have your dirty little hands deep in the internals of LAME.
I'll demonstrate using my music as an example: the top album, "Marginal Theorems", and the second most recent, "Wounded Skies", are all made into mp3s using LAME with this ATH level control and extensive mastering work on the low and high frequency cutoffs. Psy model is turned off and replaced with ATH masking only, and ATH is custom set to the needs of the track to render the reverberant field with the proper weight, where necessary. The high cutoff is a great deal more gentle than you'll usually see, so that the tendency of the encoder to grab at all the HF data it can get is mollified without seriously altering the tonal balance of the HF sounds- basically the highs are eased back in volume until they take a place in the soundstage that isn't over-forward, but retain their character. The lows are set with a combination of low cutoff and slope that allows a sort of resonant area to be moved up and down according to the needs of the track- sometimes extending well below hearing, sometimes moved up to add muscle to the midbass.
Go ahead and hear for yourself. You should hear how good the _256K_ mp3s from the same settings sounded! (I'm probably going to find a site that lets me upload those for high quality buffs or those who want a CD made- probably Ampcast.com.) Any mastering engineer could do this, but at the moment it is LAME-only because I'm not aware of any other encoder that lets you meddle with the guts of the encoding parameters that way. I asked about this for almost a year now and nobody had an answer, so I finally did it myself.
Anyone wishing to roll this into the main LAME distribution will get full cooperation from me... so far I haven't seen an interest. Which, cynically, I don't mind so much: _I_ believe in the principle of free software, but if people don't _want_ the hack by which I'm able to encode ambient information properly, fine: I'll just use it myself. I happen to think it is one hell of a secret weapon. I posted on rec.audio.pro about my modified Lexicon reverb and used 'Marginal Theorems' (128K mp3) as a demo of what I do with my Lexi and people were _floored_. They didn't neccesarily figure out how much of that I owed to free software and LAME, though;)
Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of Salon, has written a followup article" to 'Information Poisoning': if you were thinking about flaming Salon in email try reading this first, as they have been pretty swamped with outraged letters:)
Actually there's another aspect to the first group, the Microsoft Zombie VB Developers. Yes, that approach is a lot easier than C programming, but guess what?
MacOS has a comparable product- 'REALbasic'. This was originally a labor of love by a single very talented developer, Andrew Barry, designed to be as approachable and _more_ sensible than VB. When Andrew Barry got exhausted and resigned, other programmers were hired and they successfully took over the development- including bringing it over to OSX.
Most Linux developers may not be into this style of development- it's more drag-and-drop of GUI components and dropping code snippets (even dragging them from the online reference!) into the relevant control events. However, the MZA types will love it- and even if you're not a zombie idiot the accessibility and rapidity of it all is very nice.
I wrote an airfoil data generation program in this language the other night- it literally took only a night of work to produce a working program that did the following:
drag and drop 'text clipping' with starter foil data into a text area: pre-existing capability of object
parse the text clipping into arrays from 0-100 on top and bottom wing surfaces with interpolation between missing points
plot arrays on a canvas object (relatively simple)
smooth the foil w. sharp or blunt edges (imperfectly executed but OK)
tweak points up or down including a width factor affecting adjacent points- _way_ easy using interactions between existing controls- most related events got only a line of code or two
print out the arrays into the original text format to be dragged back out of the window- very easy again, minor workarounds for twitchy editfield implentation
I daresay a lot of people think you can only do that on Windows with VB (never mind that VB is more complicated with a steeper initial curve than REALbasic- you can literally drag stuff into a window in RB and build the program without writing a line of code and it won't _do_ anything but all the controls will 'work' already)
However, even if there's not going to be anything as approachable for Linux (i.e. more dumb-simple than C console apps), a competing product already exists on MacOS and compiles to trad MacOS and OSX apps- and Windows apps for that matter, though the work the programmers have to do to keep that end afloat is 10X as much work as they have to do for the MacOS side, all the bugfix reports are invariably _loaded_ with 'Win' bugs that were fixed or worked around.
Anyhow- not even VB is a permanent safe haven for MS. Comparable products exist.
(BTW- 'the red pen'? Did you by any chance attend the Cambridge School of Weston? If so, you knew me as 'The Poet')
Re:OK, I'll go on record with a detailed guess
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 2
You're hosed, of course. What else? At low altitudes there isn't much time to operate a parachute. I think these types of craft are operating in an area (0-1000 feet) where there really is no good safety mechanism in the event of a mechanical failure. Best you can do is cut down on the bulk and weight so it's not much different than a unencumbered person falling out of the sky.
On the bright side, turbine jets have a reliability rate an order of magnitude better than reciprocating internal combustion engines- there isn't much _to_ fail. Flameouts can happen if you slam on high power suddenly resulting in a turbine stall- remember this design would be optimised for a lower rate of speed in the first place, I think it would be not that hard to eliminate the risk of a turbine stall within such a limited operating range. Unlike a 747 turbine, a portable heli turbine would not _have_ to go from 0 to 700 mph, and would not have to have the capability to dump that much fuel in that you could stall the turbines (early 747 engines suffered from a behavior that when you pushed the throttles forward firmly, you got a huge bang and a turbine stall- they had to bring up the engine speed more smoothly with throttle interlocks to avoid this, because of the huge difference in fuel flow and thrust between low and high power)
I think the idea with IT (sticking with my original guess on its identity) must be, "Limit maneuverability to 'stable and gentle' and increase the engine's reliability until it's waaaay beyond the average reliability of, say, car engines/TIRES/brakes/steering linkages etc".
It'd be a hard _sell_, but the actual engineering problem is nowhere near as hard. It's not that much of a problem to produce a jet turbine that is orders of magnitude more reliable than, say, a car. The very light duty requirements and materials such as titanium would only make this easier.
Re:OK, I'll go on record with a detailed guess
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 2
One more touch of detail, and if this turns out to be the case I expect to be worshipped as a god of prognostication and/or radical aeronautics...
I think he is taking the exhaust from the primary jet turbines- and feeding it into the cowling to help spin the fans, through a system of ducts that would (serendipitously) also act as mufflers to some extent. Then the exhaust directed right at the fans would not only help spin them, but the hot jet exhaust would mix with the perfectly cool and safe bypass in the area of the fan blades- where you would not be sticking your hand anyhow (possibly there is wire mesh or something so you _can't_). By the time that air hits the ground or a person underneath, it's mixed with the cool air and diffused in a much broader airflow. There are no hot spots, and no areas of extremely high airflow, period. You could hover directly over someone and only blow the hell out of their hair and probably blow their glasses off- you wouldn't burn them or abrade them.
Oh, and it will not have control systems other than some form of thrust control- directional control would be through shifting body weight like a hang glider. Weight again, and desire for a simple, instinctive interface. You'd just step on, fire up the jets (powerful but non-shrill whooooosh), lift off and tilt yourself in the direction you'd want to go. It'll be powerfully self-centering, possibly with a very small confined area to stand on (to further make it impossible to have the thing off-balance).
Yeesh, if this isn't it I want to get someone to build what I'm talking about. I want one:)
OK, I'll go on record with a detailed guess
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 2
I say it is a dual ducted fanjet portable helicopter- stretching the definition of 'helicopter' considerably.
Dual, because that is the most sensible configuration for a personal hover unit- one at each shoulder. Ducted, to help contain noise, improve safety, and because the fanjet operates on the principle of surrounding the bypass fan with a cowling to increase its efficiency.
We are talking about twin micro high-bypass jet engines of some variety- bear in mind that the high-bypass means the jet exhaust is only the center of the blast, and the vanes turn a much larger fan which produces most of the thrust through suction and its own exhaust. This muffles the jet whine and produces huge amounts of thrust- hundreds of thousands of pounds at very high efficiency for 747s, and those fans are not all that much bigger than a tall man.
Fans for jets are designed to take bird impacts directly in the blades at close to the speed of sound- this personal version could get away with _much_ lighter construction. The lighter the construction, the less weight it has to lift and the less thrust, noise and general air violence it has to generate- also, jets are optimised to fly at very high speeds. There is no reason to believe a high-bypass jet could not be designed to operate in the hovering position- if you wonder about the hot jet exhaust consider this- turboprop engines are also jet engines turning propellers, and many modern turboprop engines have the jet section (which produces the power) firing backwards. Air comes in the back, turns around, and goes out the front after powering the props! If that is possible, so is having the jet exhaust going through a _muffler_ after powering the fans. And again, these engines could be tiny tiny tiny if they only have to lift betwen 50 and 150 pounds _each_, at a very specific airflow (hovering). The whole design would be altered throughout to optimise for the very different conditions- for instance, 747 engine fans have to take brutal impacts, but these little fans could be far, far lighter.
Consider some other clues- Slashdot has run an article on a potential new method of making _titanium_ almost as cheaply as aluminum. Who is using titanium in mass production now? Steve Jobs. Who is said to know all about this IT thing? Steve Jobs...
I am almost certain that this dual fan personal heli-backpack thing is made mostly out of titanium. It might be a tenth- a fiftieth! of the weight of the old jet backbacks and those proof-of-concept things in which the vehicle is half again as heavy as the passenger. High-bypass jet engines can be outrageously light- even _without_ heavy use of titanium you'd be surprised how light turbine engines are compared with reciprocating engines. Turbines can be designed to run at the ultimate peak efficient RPM for their operation- and with this design, the fans too can be designed to also run at peak efficiency. Then instead of adding so much thrust that you can go 'kapwing' up into the sky, you just cut back on the engines more and more until the peak output is just enough to lift you easily- and the engines are about the size of big Maglite flashlights...
Mark my words. I bet this is what it is. What the heck else could it be? A unicycle? Please.
A laugh can top 120db, you know. Laughs can be extraordinarily intense noises. Bezos sounds like he has a _seriously_ loud laugh.
I say it's a backpack helicopter- twin fans or something. The reason Bezos cracked up would be this: here's a guy hovering in a helicopter suit, _indoors_. I'd have laughed too:) also, that would be one screaming hell of a demo for the convenience and containedness of the vehicle, if you demoed hovering it in a _room_ safely without it being wildly daring and dangerous. Suppose they had these guys like Bezos in a room and _flew_ the thing in through a door? Very impressive demo that would be. The idea is, this is a vehicle so manageable that it's not unthinkable to give it to plain old commuters, so they can commute through 3D space instead of sitting idling in traffic...
It will be interesting to see whether modern corporations can hire private armies to murder guild/association/union organisers, as they did in the 20s...
You've _got_ to be kidding. Yes, this guy is an idiot, but he's no Green- he's a fascist. And so are you- if you want to totally set the corporations free to 'do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law'.
I am only a person: meaning that I am not legally compelled to maximize my income by any means necessary. I cannot reasonably expect to hire lawyers to exempt me from murder. I am not expected to try and destroy my neighbors. I'm expected to operate within a social system with pretty clear limits- not simply within the letter, but the spirit of the law, because I am a person.
Corporations are _so_ different from this it's not remotely funny. Laws banning corporations _are_ the answer: let them do business with some PERSON taking responsibility. Failing that, laws restricting corporations would be a step in the right direction.
Certainly, the most direct power comes out of the barrel of a gun. However, too many people conveniently forget the indisputable history of corporations hiring their own gunmen- most notably in the Roaring 20s, an era with many similarities to this one. Can you blame any of us for swearing, 'never again'?
Radio station playlists are also dictated by an independent promotion coalition traditionally known as 'The Network', functionally equivalent to payola, which comprises as much as a third of the list price of a top-40 CD. Back in 1980, Dick Asher of Columbia Records tried to break this network (because it leeched off so much money from record company profits!) using the Pink Floyd monster hit album, "The Wall". The single was "Another Brick In The Wall (pt 2)". For the duration of Dick Asher's experiment, which took place during Floyd's LA debut of their 'The Wall' concert tour, no LA Top 40 station would play Pink Floyd's new single. That's a total lockout of the top single of the #1 album of an act commencing a major tour IN THAT TOWN- zero airplay, total freezeout. Steve O'Rourke, Floyd's manager, found out and made Asher cave in- one morning soon after the LA leg of the tour ended, Asher paid off The Network. By that afternoon, "Another Brick In The Wall pt 2" was on Top 40 radio in LA, and from there it spread to Top 40 nationwide, and Asher was left pondering what he had learned.
Which is to say: if we use the people involved with tracking and controlling radio station airplay we are so fucked. Be careful what you ask for.
We are talking about music- at least that's what the guy writing the article was talking about.
That means we are NOT talking about state funded arts. We are talking about state funded record execs. Are we possibly laboring under the misconception that the artists will get any of this? And what about the business case for the struggling band not contractually raped by a large record company? This proposal takes money from that band's distribution and awards it to the execs of the big record company!
I can't think of a _worse_ way to deal with the situation. Better that _nobody_ should get any money, than if money gets taken from small artists and awarded to the big ones.
What this guy is proposing is the functional equivalent of saying, "Since all operating systems are pirated, all customers should pay an aggregate tax to Microsoft whenever they DL Windows, Be, BSD, MacOS or Linux because Windows is by far the most 'infringed upon' with piracy". Now is the reality of this proposal sinking in? Seems there are a few Slashdotters all too happy to pay danegeld to a trust as long as it's not in _their_ line of work.
The Reagan administration presided over the IBM case- and the Supreme court used up their political partisanship on the election, wouldn't you say?
Sorry- I don't think you're aware of political realities. Neither is Microsoft, for that matter. How many times do people have to say 'FoF cannot be so easily overturned' before it is heard?
Slashdot Mirror
Like "You can't work as a programmer on a project involving all of the following (feature X, feature Y, feature Z) for four months." You can go to a competitor and use _part_ of what you've learned on this big complex cutting edge product, but the nonco gets really specific and is obviously designed to stop you from walking off with the WHOLE project in one big lump. Anyone trying to acquire your team will have to either sit on their hands for four months, or shuffle the whole team with managers programming and programmers testing and testers managing, or pick only _part_ of the feature set and do only that.
That would hold up in court, but any of the loopholes results in an inefficiency- the 'raider' would either not be delivering the full feature set, or would be immediately shuffling jobs and having everyone working away from their core areas, or would pay the people to sit on their hands for four months. However they _are_ allowed to try any of the three, and this is why they can legitimately be forbidden from snatching up the whole damn project team and saying 'Cool- finish it and _we'll_ ship it.'
Something like that, the noncompete (specifically written for each employee, mind you) would have real teeth.
"You cannot work for our competitors for a year!" is worthless. So it's a question of, were the Microsoft lawyers being sharp when they wrote these up, or were they being arrogant? If they were being arrogant and wrote them in general terms or anything resembling boilerplate terms then the noncompetes are worthless.
The key points apply with, say, sales staff or whatever. If a sales guy for a regular company is leaving and has a noncompete, one good way to draft the noncompete is to say that (for instance) the guy can't take with him the clients within a ten mile radius for six months. After that he can try for 'em but he can't go straight to a competing company and drop by the clients going "Hi, me again. We'll still be covering your needs only you may notice a different name on the trucks".
The limitations (10 mile radius, six months) are what make the noncompete have serious teeth. Big arrogant noncompetes are routinely considered invalid contracts. Sure the guy signed it but the court would laugh at the company making it. I think it's simply the threat of MS lawyers and the _costs_ of litigation that have stomped this startup company. That is bad too, but don't confuse it with 'the noncompete forbade them from working for the startup!'. There's a great deal of case law, apparently, to show that overblown noncompetes don't even work and get thrown out by the court. If you want to draft a noncompete that does actually work, you limit things quite drastically and leave loopholes that you can still compete with even if the departing person takes advantage of the loophole (such as outside the ten mile radius- fair enough- or waiting six months before going after his former clients, by which time you've solidified their relationship with a new sales guy, right?)
In other words, the current situation is heavily monopolised and doesn't represent a market in any normal sense. _Any_ additional player getting a larger share legitimises the very concept of 'additional player'.
The more OSX out there, the more plausible the concept of 'well I have an x86 already, how about I run Linux?'. The more Linux out there, the more plausible the concept of 'if I'm already not running Windows maybe I want something real slick'. Sort of a mutual feedback thing.
If your list is tainted, possibly because its opt-in procedures allow or once allowed abuses, why not throw it away and begin assembling a new one? It sounds like your list is tainted.
Maybe the future is more about web sites, boards like Slashdot etc. and less about 'commercial email' or even 'this is very important to you' email.
I know that if every single political fringe, environmental activist group, union, whatever that I AGREED WITH AND SUPPORTED felt free to send me email whenever something happened in the world that interested me, I would STILL BE BURIED in email and my email account would be unusable. I can't overemphasise this. It's not about my consent or interest in what's being sent, it is about the fact that the world contains more information than I can process, and always will. In this light, mass mailing of _any_ sort is a disturbing mechanism to me, because it always keeps the potential to go right off the scale and become impossible volume.
I think it's time to redefine email as 'private communications only'. There's no way to consider it a public resource without causing trouble. I can have an email account on my web page about Stratocasters, but this doesn't mean that everyone who sells Stratocasters can proceed to email me about what _they_ want to sell. The trick with the internet is that one aspect to the loss of privacy means that sellers can research and identify potential buyers: in the future ten thousand people a day can research what I really want and need, and then email me entirely personal letters asking me to buy something that I specifically want. That doesn't change the fact that ten thousand emails a day is still impossible, unmanageable... the ability of the world to produce RELEVANT information is far greater than the ability of a person to process it.
THAT is why spam is a crime. In a peculiar way it is more akin to rape than theft. "You _are_ going to love my special offer now! Your attention belongs to me now. Don't try and get away!"
The trouble with that position is, it assumes there has to be cost involved with spamming. As long as it's possible to hijack someone else's account for spamming, or use a throwaway account while paying a flat rate, the cost is effectively dumped onto the recipients. That is the whole _point_...
Ahhhh... that would be _such_ a fitting use of the technology. It would do many people good to have their corporate media forcibly turned off. Please, if this ever becomes possible, somebody do it- turn off _all_ the TVs >:)
I would say it was the 'death of a thousand cuts' one. But then, I don't have any form of TV or cable in the house...
"Progress Report: technically, our progress is nil because we have taken actions technically described as 'doing squat'"
Thank you, see you in 180 days??
Why do I say this when it's not in the LAME docs? Because LAME is open source, I needed it, and I hacked it in.
It's that simple. (I've tried to interest the coders in this but they don't 'get it': I think mastering engineers will be a lot more interested.) Let me put it this way- as long as there are mastering engineers and studio types willing to struggle with the code enough to look after _their_ interests, LAME will beat whatever Fraunhofer comes up with, because Fraunhofer is all computer geek researchers- I see them going for a 'one size fits all' consumer encoder, and this is totally unacceptable and wrong for professional use.
And encoding music into mp3 or similar lossy formats _is_ a professional task: in the field of music it is so competitive that anything a band or artist can do to give themselves an edge _will_ be done. If LAME operated by a real mastering engineer using serious reference speakers and adjusted to let the soul of the song through beats the quality level of mp3pro operated by the artist... then the guy using LAME will score more downloads, get more attention and money, sell more CDs when his music _sounds_ _better_ at the same bitrate, and the guy using mp3pro and coloring his sound with a preset compressor that isn't tailored for the individual song will _lose_.
This is such an obvious development, and it is totally favoring the 'open source' side of things, because there are not enough 'mastering engineers', even wannabes, to tailor a commercial product to them- yet the work they do can outperform what you'll get from preset compressors. It's not the easiest skill to acquire but if you can do serious mastering on CDs you have the skillset to know what to do when you have your dirty little hands deep in the internals of LAME.
I'll demonstrate using my music as an example: the top album, "Marginal Theorems", and the second most recent, "Wounded Skies", are all made into mp3s using LAME with this ATH level control and extensive mastering work on the low and high frequency cutoffs. Psy model is turned off and replaced with ATH masking only, and ATH is custom set to the needs of the track to render the reverberant field with the proper weight, where necessary. The high cutoff is a great deal more gentle than you'll usually see, so that the tendency of the encoder to grab at all the HF data it can get is mollified without seriously altering the tonal balance of the HF sounds- basically the highs are eased back in volume until they take a place in the soundstage that isn't over-forward, but retain their character. The lows are set with a combination of low cutoff and slope that allows a sort of resonant area to be moved up and down according to the needs of the track- sometimes extending well below hearing, sometimes moved up to add muscle to the midbass.
Go ahead and hear for yourself. You should hear how good the _256K_ mp3s from the same settings sounded! (I'm probably going to find a site that lets me upload those for high quality buffs or those who want a CD made- probably Ampcast.com.) Any mastering engineer could do this, but at the moment it is LAME-only because I'm not aware of any other encoder that lets you meddle with the guts of the encoding parameters that way. I asked about this for almost a year now and nobody had an answer, so I finally did it myself.
Anyone wishing to roll this into the main LAME distribution will get full cooperation from me... so far I haven't seen an interest. Which, cynically, I don't mind so much: _I_ believe in the principle of free software, but if people don't _want_ the hack by which I'm able to encode ambient information properly, fine: I'll just use it myself. I happen to think it is one hell of a secret weapon. I posted on rec.audio.pro about my modified Lexicon reverb and used 'Marginal Theorems' (128K mp3) as a demo of what I do with my Lexi and people were _floored_. They didn't neccesarily figure out how much of that I owed to free software and LAME, though ;)
muahaha, free software as secret weapon!
Which is a good point- you can't simply _accept_ claims like that, it's suicidal. They will claim _anything_.
Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of Salon, has written a followup article" to 'Information Poisoning': if you were thinking about flaming Salon in email try reading this first, as they have been pretty swamped with outraged letters :)
MacOS has a comparable product- 'REALbasic'. This was originally a labor of love by a single very talented developer, Andrew Barry, designed to be as approachable and _more_ sensible than VB. When Andrew Barry got exhausted and resigned, other programmers were hired and they successfully took over the development- including bringing it over to OSX.
Most Linux developers may not be into this style of development- it's more drag-and-drop of GUI components and dropping code snippets (even dragging them from the online reference!) into the relevant control events. However, the MZA types will love it- and even if you're not a zombie idiot the accessibility and rapidity of it all is very nice.
I wrote an airfoil data generation program in this language the other night- it literally took only a night of work to produce a working program that did the following:
I daresay a lot of people think you can only do that on Windows with VB (never mind that VB is more complicated with a steeper initial curve than REALbasic- you can literally drag stuff into a window in RB and build the program without writing a line of code and it won't _do_ anything but all the controls will 'work' already)
However, even if there's not going to be anything as approachable for Linux (i.e. more dumb-simple than C console apps), a competing product already exists on MacOS and compiles to trad MacOS and OSX apps- and Windows apps for that matter, though the work the programmers have to do to keep that end afloat is 10X as much work as they have to do for the MacOS side, all the bugfix reports are invariably _loaded_ with 'Win' bugs that were fixed or worked around.
Anyhow- not even VB is a permanent safe haven for MS. Comparable products exist.
(BTW- 'the red pen'? Did you by any chance attend the Cambridge School of Weston? If so, you knew me as 'The Poet')
On the bright side, turbine jets have a reliability rate an order of magnitude better than reciprocating internal combustion engines- there isn't much _to_ fail. Flameouts can happen if you slam on high power suddenly resulting in a turbine stall- remember this design would be optimised for a lower rate of speed in the first place, I think it would be not that hard to eliminate the risk of a turbine stall within such a limited operating range. Unlike a 747 turbine, a portable heli turbine would not _have_ to go from 0 to 700 mph, and would not have to have the capability to dump that much fuel in that you could stall the turbines (early 747 engines suffered from a behavior that when you pushed the throttles forward firmly, you got a huge bang and a turbine stall- they had to bring up the engine speed more smoothly with throttle interlocks to avoid this, because of the huge difference in fuel flow and thrust between low and high power)
I think the idea with IT (sticking with my original guess on its identity) must be, "Limit maneuverability to 'stable and gentle' and increase the engine's reliability until it's waaaay beyond the average reliability of, say, car engines/TIRES/brakes/steering linkages etc".
It'd be a hard _sell_, but the actual engineering problem is nowhere near as hard. It's not that much of a problem to produce a jet turbine that is orders of magnitude more reliable than, say, a car. The very light duty requirements and materials such as titanium would only make this easier.
I think he is taking the exhaust from the primary jet turbines- and feeding it into the cowling to help spin the fans, through a system of ducts that would (serendipitously) also act as mufflers to some extent. Then the exhaust directed right at the fans would not only help spin them, but the hot jet exhaust would mix with the perfectly cool and safe bypass in the area of the fan blades- where you would not be sticking your hand anyhow (possibly there is wire mesh or something so you _can't_). By the time that air hits the ground or a person underneath, it's mixed with the cool air and diffused in a much broader airflow. There are no hot spots, and no areas of extremely high airflow, period. You could hover directly over someone and only blow the hell out of their hair and probably blow their glasses off- you wouldn't burn them or abrade them.
Oh, and it will not have control systems other than some form of thrust control- directional control would be through shifting body weight like a hang glider. Weight again, and desire for a simple, instinctive interface. You'd just step on, fire up the jets (powerful but non-shrill whooooosh), lift off and tilt yourself in the direction you'd want to go. It'll be powerfully self-centering, possibly with a very small confined area to stand on (to further make it impossible to have the thing off-balance).
Yeesh, if this isn't it I want to get someone to build what I'm talking about. I want one :)
Dual, because that is the most sensible configuration for a personal hover unit- one at each shoulder. Ducted, to help contain noise, improve safety, and because the fanjet operates on the principle of surrounding the bypass fan with a cowling to increase its efficiency.
We are talking about twin micro high-bypass jet engines of some variety- bear in mind that the high-bypass means the jet exhaust is only the center of the blast, and the vanes turn a much larger fan which produces most of the thrust through suction and its own exhaust. This muffles the jet whine and produces huge amounts of thrust- hundreds of thousands of pounds at very high efficiency for 747s, and those fans are not all that much bigger than a tall man.
Fans for jets are designed to take bird impacts directly in the blades at close to the speed of sound- this personal version could get away with _much_ lighter construction. The lighter the construction, the less weight it has to lift and the less thrust, noise and general air violence it has to generate- also, jets are optimised to fly at very high speeds. There is no reason to believe a high-bypass jet could not be designed to operate in the hovering position- if you wonder about the hot jet exhaust consider this- turboprop engines are also jet engines turning propellers, and many modern turboprop engines have the jet section (which produces the power) firing backwards. Air comes in the back, turns around, and goes out the front after powering the props! If that is possible, so is having the jet exhaust going through a _muffler_ after powering the fans. And again, these engines could be tiny tiny tiny if they only have to lift betwen 50 and 150 pounds _each_, at a very specific airflow (hovering). The whole design would be altered throughout to optimise for the very different conditions- for instance, 747 engine fans have to take brutal impacts, but these little fans could be far, far lighter.
Consider some other clues- Slashdot has run an article on a potential new method of making _titanium_ almost as cheaply as aluminum. Who is using titanium in mass production now? Steve Jobs. Who is said to know all about this IT thing? Steve Jobs...
I am almost certain that this dual fan personal heli-backpack thing is made mostly out of titanium. It might be a tenth- a fiftieth! of the weight of the old jet backbacks and those proof-of-concept things in which the vehicle is half again as heavy as the passenger. High-bypass jet engines can be outrageously light- even _without_ heavy use of titanium you'd be surprised how light turbine engines are compared with reciprocating engines. Turbines can be designed to run at the ultimate peak efficient RPM for their operation- and with this design, the fans too can be designed to also run at peak efficiency. Then instead of adding so much thrust that you can go 'kapwing' up into the sky, you just cut back on the engines more and more until the peak output is just enough to lift you easily- and the engines are about the size of big Maglite flashlights...
Mark my words. I bet this is what it is. What the heck else could it be? A unicycle? Please.
I say it's a backpack helicopter- twin fans or something. The reason Bezos cracked up would be this: here's a guy hovering in a helicopter suit, _indoors_. I'd have laughed too :) also, that would be one screaming hell of a demo for the convenience and containedness of the vehicle, if you demoed hovering it in a _room_ safely without it being wildly daring and dangerous. Suppose they had these guys like Bezos in a room and _flew_ the thing in through a door? Very impressive demo that would be. The idea is, this is a vehicle so manageable that it's not unthinkable to give it to plain old commuters, so they can commute through 3D space instead of sitting idling in traffic...
Maybe Jobs is more hip to genuine scientific innovation than you ;)
It will be interesting to see whether modern corporations can hire private armies to murder guild/association/union organisers, as they did in the 20s...
I am only a person: meaning that I am not legally compelled to maximize my income by any means necessary. I cannot reasonably expect to hire lawyers to exempt me from murder. I am not expected to try and destroy my neighbors. I'm expected to operate within a social system with pretty clear limits- not simply within the letter, but the spirit of the law, because I am a person.
Corporations are _so_ different from this it's not remotely funny. Laws banning corporations _are_ the answer: let them do business with some PERSON taking responsibility. Failing that, laws restricting corporations would be a step in the right direction.
Certainly, the most direct power comes out of the barrel of a gun. However, too many people conveniently forget the indisputable history of corporations hiring their own gunmen- most notably in the Roaring 20s, an era with many similarities to this one. Can you blame any of us for swearing, 'never again'?
Which is to say: if we use the people involved with tracking and controlling radio station airplay we are so fucked. Be careful what you ask for.
That means we are NOT talking about state funded arts. We are talking about state funded record execs. Are we possibly laboring under the misconception that the artists will get any of this? And what about the business case for the struggling band not contractually raped by a large record company? This proposal takes money from that band's distribution and awards it to the execs of the big record company!
I can't think of a _worse_ way to deal with the situation. Better that _nobody_ should get any money, than if money gets taken from small artists and awarded to the big ones.
What this guy is proposing is the functional equivalent of saying, "Since all operating systems are pirated, all customers should pay an aggregate tax to Microsoft whenever they DL Windows, Be, BSD, MacOS or Linux because Windows is by far the most 'infringed upon' with piracy". Now is the reality of this proposal sinking in? Seems there are a few Slashdotters all too happy to pay danegeld to a trust as long as it's not in _their_ line of work.
Sorry- I don't think you're aware of political realities. Neither is Microsoft, for that matter. How many times do people have to say 'FoF cannot be so easily overturned' before it is heard?
hehehehehehe....