Huh? It's not a product- may very well never ship, and its positioning is a huge void. One interesting note was just how much waffling Abrash really did- surely some people noticed how little he actually said? Almost every question elicited a 'Nobody really knows yet' kind of response. And the 'degenerate triangles'! 'degenerate' is a big red flag and Abrash clearly knows it- 'degenerate triangles' means 'X billion triangles provided they are all at the same coordinates with no texturing', that sort of thing. This is not a picture of production coding...
I think you're Astroturf:) in any case, why say anything bad about a 'product' that's not likely to ever exist? Every X-Box sale made could be seen as a Windows sale lost. Particularly if MS has success in its antitrust battles, it will abandon X-Box (you're not going to claim they _can't_ _afford_ to scrap all that research? MS 'can't afford'?) which will have served its purpose- keeping PC game development from spreading out to consoles too much.
Of course, it's a good question whether decent PC game development is even feasible anymore, so why say bad things? woo xbox 'yay'. Bit of a moot point isn't it? Let it preside over a decaying empire- if it even ships- hell, let it be a puppet symbol of the strength of the industry, whatEVER.
Interesting stuff and genuine innovation will just have to go on, rough-edged and ill-funded, outside of the commercial sector. What else is new?
If you sign with Sony, there is no 'your own' creative work. A typical record label contract for a promising but new artist nails _everything_ down- for instance, you may not have rights to your own name (see The Artist Now Finally Once Again Known As Prince). Seen those 'courtesy of XYZ records' notices when musicians guest on other musicians' records? That is because the label owns ANYTHING the musician may produce. You're damn right that you lose the right to distribute your own creative work- including the work you haven't done yet but might be only thinking about. I'm still waiting to hear about the artist sued over a song because the label believes the artist _thought_ of the song while they were under contract. The artist customarily is pressured into signing a contract that gives _everything_ to the label and renders the artist entirely unable to work as an artist except by permission of the label. This is totally customary- if you don't like this sort of thing, don't support the RIAA labels by buying albums from them.
"A man from a company we can't name said we oughta take his pen
and sign on the line for a real good time but he didn't tell us when
that good time would be something that was really 'happenin'
so the band broke up and it looks like we will never play again..." o/`
90s- ditto at more like $20,000, first digital multitrack but _seriously_ inadequate $50,000 again.
Now- 20-24 bit minimum, ADAT available in this class for under $3000, nonlinear DAW recording in a similar pricerange not counting the computer and disk costs. That's for something like Digi Pro Tools: ask the GIS crew about that.
Mixing
70s- mixing console $10,000? Less tendency for hugeness and a zillion busses.
90s- mixing console $10-50,000. This is where huge consoles really took off- also, lower end consoles developed a terrible cheapness and noisiness, moving into the consumer zone. At this time digital consoles were useless even though they cost the earth- early digital consoles featured 16 bit busses and NO dithering. Any home PC can do better these days with the proper software.
Now- analog consoles same as 90s unless you build your own and know your way around audiophile design- low end's a third as cheap as it used to be, but still very cheesy. Digital consoles becoming available with 24, 36 or even higher bit depths on the busses. DAW a mixed bag- you can do work with deep busses and good software for under $10,000, you can kluge the same thing for under $1000 if you know what you're doing, if you can build circuitry you can get in there with analog gear and match the fluidity but _not_ the noise floor (never underestimate the 'bit depth' of analog- no rounding errors at all, and dithering becomes unnecessary- dithering is actually a type of noise at about -110db!). More than ever it's WHAT you know not what you SPEND- demand is turning back towards high end audio characteristics, and industry standards are slipping. Which brings us to-
Mastering and Release
70s- ouch! Good luck getting anywhere _near_ this stage. Disc mastering equipment in the millions of dollars, owned only by mastering houses- you simply could not play in this area, not even the recording studios did. There was never a consumer market for vinyl disc mastering.
90s- even more ouch! While older equipment would pass into the hands of semipros and rich amateurs for mere hundreds of thousands of dollars (perhaps less), while the Philips cassette became widely available, the top end continued to skyrocket, developing techniques like multiband compression to saturate the tonality of the music while suppressing unruly peaks. The first CD mastering equipment was staggeringly expensive as well. It was an era where there was a huge gap between 'bedroom recording and mastering' and the commercial stuff- you simply couldn't get anywhere near the commercial quality on cassette 4-tracks and 'mastering' to a dubbing cassette deck. For the first time you could do it all yourself, but the technology just wasn't there for other than hobbyist use or demos.
Now- it gets _interesting_. People are used to assuming that you _must_ be able to spend millions to get state of the art sound- but, $200 CD-R burners? Free or shareware software that mixes and edits in 24 bit depths? You can get software for _free_ today, right now, that substantially beats what was the state of the art in the mid-90s. The technology is there- intensely there. Processes like multiband compression can be replicated in software... everything that used to take $50,000 mastering house equipment is becoming available in software. There's one major exception- monitoring- you _cannot_ do professional mastering work over Yamaha NS-10s, much less PC multimedia speakers or headphones. By the same token, amplification has to be terrific. And even HERE it's becoming accessible! If you aren't fussy, you could get one of the high-end multimedia systems- for instance, the Klipsch Promedia, which can handle substantial monitoring volumes without distorting- and that would be good enough to work with, at under $1000.
Summary
Obviously, there's a need for more information out there- at this point it's not money that limits a home-recording musician (if you can get a few thousand dollars over the course of a few years you can assemble the required tools), it's information. You could say, 'get a 20-bit ADAT or a computer-based DAW with at least 24 bit mix busses and a CD burner' but that's like saying 'download EGCS, download the kernel sources- great, now write clustering software for i-openers over infrared ports!'. Mixing is as much a craft as an art and treating it like Jackson Pollock treated a canvas WILL result in dodgy mixes that are obviously not professional- and mastering has long been considered a black art, just as much as writing tricky device drivers! The information also tends to be hoarded, but with the Internet this breaks down a bit- for instance, I've read numerous rants by mastering engineers on how the major labels are getting into an arms race with compression and loudness, which is ruining the enjoyable quality of the sound (think later Britney Spears, and listen to the actual sounds being used- that's ruthlessly overcompressed).
So the final answer would be somewhere between two and twenty thousand dollars for the equipment required to produce the high quality recording (some of which you may already have, like a computer and CD burner), BUT it will either cost you a couple years of determined study or another two to twenty thousand dollars to hire someone who can use that gear properly. It's quite like having precision parts machined with a large and powerful machine shop, routers and lathes and stuff- sure if you have the gear you _could_ do it, the question to ask is if you know what you're doing with machine tools. With studios it's 'do you know what you're doing with recording/mastering tools'. The tools themselves are more and more affordable, and even the information is becoming more accessible, but you have to be willing to learn- it's a discipline as demanding as programming, in its own way.
Does that answer the question? *creak of dead-from-boredom people falling over in a shower of dust*;)
It's gratifying to see your point (1) on error of fact- I know I was greatly impressed with the depth of understanding illustrated by Jackson's findings of fact, and now more than ever his decision to issue 'em seperately is vindicated. He had to know his findings of law would be ripped to shreds for any or no reason at all. The pleasing part is that MS would have to show nobody could have reached those conclusions of fact- as you say, ain't happening. They are all too convincing.
Regarding the error in law, clearly this is what the MS guys are after- the question is, to what end? I wonder if they really expect a slap on the wrist, or think they can make insincere pledges of good faith at this point. The question that comes to my mind is this: might the appeals court entirely reject Jackson's breakup idea, instead choosing to be 'nice' by leaving MS in one piece- and imposing a web of REGULATION? It's hard to see how many other answers there would be. In a lot of ways MS would be better off broken up- I saw another poster expressing gratitude that they would not 'metastasize', and the analogy is both jarring and apt. Perhaps we're all better off if they are _not_ broken up, if they remain monolithic.
There needs to be more than one company for it to be an 'economy'.
With only one company, it's more like 'fascism' or the classic Cold War version of 'communism'- you cannot blithely separate industry from government if one entity of industry runs everything.
There are many mechanisms by which a company (particularly in information technology) can leverage its existing strengths to add more strengths and use all this strength not to help its customers but to screw competitors. Microsoft's illustrated this nicely and will no doubt have entire chapters of future history books, next to Standard Oil and the railroads and Ma Bell. Sort of the 'rabid weasel' variant of a classic trust- a literal version of 'network effects!
If such a company manages to screw everybody else badly enough that there's no point even trying to do business in the field being controlled, then there is no more capitalist market in that field- see point 1, repeat until you have a clue, because...
It ain't a 'market' if you can't comparison shop!:)
Corporations- the entities that can kill you for only a small fine!:P
In fact, if killing you will earn/save them more money than they would be fined for doing so, the corporation is _obligated_ to kill you! Isn't fiduciary duty wonderful? Isn't it neat to be able to afford lawyers that can finally make the penalties of criminal negligence cheaper than redesigning that gas tank, testing those tires, inspecting that food product? Isn't it just WIZZA PEACHY KEENO that fiduciary duty obliges the corporation to kill people if that gains shareholders more money than fixing the problems?
Criminal negligence- it's not just a good idea, it's the law!:P
(steps aside to watch the battle between '+1 insightful' and '-1 troll' with a couple of really sick bastards chiming in as '+1 funny':) )
I saw an argument that convinced me today to actually vote for Nader. It is this: if he gets what, 15% of the popular vote, the Green party ends up with federal funding like the Democrats and Republicans, and we suddenly have a THREE party system instead of an entrenched, deeply corrupt two party system.
I don't have any faith that Gore would be that much better than Bush. Why do you? I'm not certain Nader would be much use either- but he is _different_ and coming from outside the two party system, besides which his agenda about corporations and trusts is very clear and mirrors my own. I am absolutely certain about who I want to be counted for at this point, and it doesn't matter so much that he's not super likely to win. A vote for Nader is notice of one more person who's _really_ against corpocracy. That record will stand, and the other politicians are very aware of these things. It puts them ALL on notice. If I voted for Gore, it would be meaningless- nothing about that says what I want to say with a vote. Even if he wins there's no way to tell I actually cared about something- 'anti-Bush' isn't much of an agenda and sends no message. 'actually voted for Nader, dammit!' damn well sends a message, win or lose.
The problem is, if it genuinely looks like the popular opinion's gone against Gates, all that bribe money goes for naught- the politician blithely doublecrosses the special interest in order to get re-elected. This would go for even Bush- if it looked like he was going to lose power and influence because he was easily painted as the puppet of MS, he would of course avoid helping them and possibly even hurt them to show he was not beholden. Therefore, paint him the puppet of MS, and see how much of that he's able to take. It _is_ an effective political attack.
The question is, how far can they really push? Their products are a lot more nebulous and undefined than they used to be- and a lot less capable of exciting the consumer. People got thrilled over Win95, because at the time it was really something novel for a PC, and it ran on a lot of computers. W2K, ME can't make that claim- hell, ME _is_ 95 service pack 27 or so, and W2K looks like it.
And remember that the whole idea of.net is to put software on a pay-per-use basis in the long run? The idea of changing consumers from a 'spend loads of money being forced to buy software' basis to a 'spend loads of money being allowed to use software you don't even get to keep' is only appealing to the stockholders- it's a loser of an idea to the consumer, who wants to believe they are getting stuff that will last forever and always remain useful- and THAT is the major (false) promise of MS software, that you get it and it will ALWAYS remain useful and NEVER go out of style or become unsupported because it's MS! MS is _always_ supported *cough, cough*
What might be happening is the final phase of the scorched earth policy. The underground (linux, MacOS, Be etc) thrives, and there's only so far MS can really push- they can only make Windows legally compulsory in an indirect way, for instance creating a climate where banking software, election voting software etc. is Windows-only because nobody thinks it's worth bothering to develop such software for anything else. If they try to go further and, say, get legislation passed to ban Macs and Linux from the Internet (using some trumped-up argument) they will fail- it would be demanding so much that nobody would go along with it. If they succeeded, people would ignore those laws. There really is only so far that they can go with their monopoly, which is a bad thing for them as their business model is still based on ravenous expansion without limits- they are heading for a fall when it's time for them to reach an equilibrium and stop growing, because they're so utterly not based on sustaining business, only on expanding it. I would even say there is a chance of their overextending and collapsing, for business reasons only- what if they held a.net and nobody came? Well, first they'd doctor the PR and doctor the accounting and insist that everything was working- the most dangerous thing they could do, yet the most likely. Then, having run the stakes up to immense heights this way, they'd be facing- the IRS, over the accounting they'd done, and the press (what remains of it) over their deceptions, all without having got enough _genuine_ mindshare to maintain a survivable business- and remember MS is prone to obsoleting their old stuff to move you to the new stuff. If they can't do that they've just sabotaged themselves.
The government's direct action just might be unnecessary...
Hey, I could go for that. That's the best argument I've heard yet for getting involved enough to vote Nader. It only takes 15% to get the Green Party in there with the Dems and Reps? I'm there. Hell with holding out for grandiose effects like getting Nader elected president (he'd probably be assassinated!:P ), I like the idea of contributing toward proving a _three_ party (or more) system is needed. It is.
Um, at what point are they going to have to come up with a design that would fly? The weight balancing on these is way off, and the elevator surfaces on Calico are completely inadequate and with the required angle of attack are totally blocked off by the body of the vehicle. Not to mention that I've never seen a _square_ leading wing edge before;) yeesh! Can we see this again when somebody with a shred of instinct has done the drawings? Certainly if you put enough engines on it you can make a brick fly- but if it's designed like these craft 'fly' would roughly mean 'describe a pretty arc connecting the ground (stubbornly) with the ground (violently).
Can't they at least steal the basic shape of NASA's X-24 lifting body? (the photograph in the article is the X-24, not 'Kitten'!) That flies- their illustrations would not, not if you strapped Shuttle boosters to them.
Yeesh- I've had my airplane designs recently sassed as 'stoner aerodynamics', but _this_ is _ridiculous_. What would that be then, quaalude aerodynamics?:)
Come to think of it, wouldn't it be interesting to have a plane with _one_ GE high-bypass fanjet between two fuselages? hmmmmm (reading Slashdot has a tendency to give me ideas for cool aircraft to design- last time it was the 'flying train' ground-effect vehicle getting me to design a landspeeder- very wide rear wing and narrower canard producing a tendency to hold a fixed altitude at around treetop height and avoid the ground. I didn't quite get it so it could hurtle over rolling terrain with no pilot input, but it is a hell of a lot easier to mow the grass with this one than with any traditional aircraft:)
That's interesting to know. I'm a huge X-Plane fan and got it when it was $200:) it stands to reason that it would work on x68 Linux under wine because Austin Meyer essentially re-implements every speck of interface- good thing to know.
I can't help but think of how essentially geeky X-Plane really is- I _do_ think it's the best flight sim out there, but then I do things like read 'Wide-Body: the making of the Boeing 747' for fun and then design a plane a bit larger than a Lear Jet, as plausibly as possible, with two GE high-bypass fanjets dwarfing the fuselage and hurling it through the air at up to Mach 1, and then flight-test it and fix the aerodynamic problems:)
_Most_ people want to shoot down stuff or play airline pilot, not design airplanes using blade element modelling. It's very much like games like RoboWar (not an official link, a design page)- the popular appeal of something this geeky is basically nil, but for those who are willing to be captivated by the technical challenge, the depth of the game becomes phenomenal. It's like that with X-Plane, because it's basically a full-on blade element modelling aerodynamic simulator with killer eye candy for $80, something the real aircraft designers would have killed for (as an initial rough-draft tool) twenty years ago.
To be playing with this sort of thing on a home computer is beyond anything I could have imagined as a kid drawing pictures of weird airplanes instead of doing homework:)
I'm a graphics person (and an audio/music person, and a video person etc etc) and I can tell you why graphics people use Macs. Some of it can be easily copied for Linux too- in fact some of it already applies to Linux.
Color calibration. This is very obvious but what the hey. 1.8 gamma works very well- gamma correction is global throughout the OS and not just confined to an app or two (the calibration instructions for Photoshop on Windows involve, among other things, opening an image in IE and the same image in Photoshop and adjusting them until they match! WTF?)
Applications. There's an awful lot of cheesy little GFX and audio and midi apps out there for Mac. Some of the cheesiest ones are the best ones. There's been a lot of little flybynight companies making amazing things for Mac and vanishing. I still have some of those products and they still kick butt. First one that comes to mind is HVS Color- a bizarre color reduction Photoshop plugin that has a formidably geeky control panel letting you weight the algorithms various ways. There's 'Megalomania', a really old MIDI patch-bay program that lets you do really nutty things like patch every other note through feedback delay pitch shifters with random velocity changes:) I make frequent use of SoundEffects 0.9.2 (dunno if it ever reached 1.0!) which is a fantastic digital audio editor that has some wild bandpass/cut filters for it and is a whole audio workshop for free download. So much of this is wacked in some way and yet, how cool it is and how useful it can be...
Stability. No, I don't mean 'not crashing' more's the pity- put it this way. I only very recently got a CD-R and began making backups of my critical files. Why? Because I knew enough about patching together working MacOSes that I honestly felt the machine could not die in such a way that I lost data. (Doh!) The funny part is, when a partition _did_ eat itself so severely that all the files went bye-bye, I freaked for a minute, then went in with Unerase and salvaged all the 'resource' files: which happened to contain _all_ the 'clipping' files that I'd been keeping important notes in. Every last one! And later I dropped them all on a creator-type-changer app and turned them all right back into clippings again and they all work as if nothing had happened. I am, needless to say, seriously sold on using clippings to keep important bits of textual data in now:)
Related: repairability. Most of the Mac graphics people have actually learned as much voodoo as they'd need to run Linux- it's just different sorts, just enough to be able to maintain their own machines in all emergencies. A guy charging a lot to do GFX work on a Mac might still have it crash on him but very likely can recover from just about anything in less than three to six hours. If you're on deadline that's very important. This is something Linux can offer as well as it also lends itself to being maintained by the user (given a pro user).
Built-in functionality: I'm on an older powermac. Having built-in SCSI is probably why I got stupid and believed my disks could not die;) it also does a great job doing demanding audio or video capture stuff. The audio circuitry gets very close to Digi third-party boards- it's quite a ways beyond Sound Blaster levels, must be using better ADCs or something.
Damn near realtime capabilities- this is the flip side of the well known Mac lack of PMT. If the menu doesn't respond to your click, oh how tiresome. However, if the menu doesn't respond to your click because you're doing _midi_ sequencing and to run system tasks would make a MIDI event happen many milliseconds late- that's very different. If you've ever sequenced on a Mac so slow that it takes 10 seconds to not even completely redraw the screen- meantime pumping out hard, solid, perfectly timed MIDI information to your synthesizers- then you'll understand. I now have an older 68040 mac dedicated to MIDI. It's overkill:) by the same token, on the Powermac demanding video or audio capture is a cinch- it just freezes up the machine until it's done. CD burns, ditto- all these sorts of things essentially say 'I am realtime priority!' and seize the machine to make sure they don't have a single bobble. Which is surely annoying- but if they _are_ super high priority, then those processes are right.
Fun stupid stuff: I noticed that the GIS crew have already put 'Gravite' on their audio workstation Mac. It's a control panel that makes icons dangle under your pointer when you pick them up. Also you can fling them using a hotkey and if you let go the key as it hits the trash, it actually places the icon in the trash! I'm currently running Kaleidoscope and Smoothtype (extremely heavy theming and antialiasing, respectively- heavy theming means the designs can be entirely ludicrous and fanciful) which are quite good at dispelling the relentless sameness of MacOS. There's lots of other interface hacks, some dreadful and fatal and others innocuous. All can be installed and uninstalled just by dragging icons around and rebooting- when I lost the HD it was after something like two years of relentless hammering and altering on the same system, without ever starting afresh. I understand Windows boxes slow to a crawl after a couple years of continuous use with lots of installing and altering and breaking and fixing:)
Ok, that was _way_ more than you ever wanted to know. I'd just like to confirm this complaining emulator writer in one thing- if you get a mac get an old one on eBay! Never assume that you must upgrade upgrade upgrade- you're better off identifying stuff that you want to do and building a system around it. Most software that's worth a crap _won't_ make you change or patch your system- if it tries, get rid of it, run Macsbug and if it installs stuff and says 'Reboot now (OK)' and there's no 'no, that's not OK!' button, cackle and hit 'cmd-power' and drop into the low level debugger and go 'es' (escape to shell) and get rid of whatever got added.
But I digress. Anyhow you can probably get an entire mac for less than he'd be selling that emulator for:) try 7500/7600/8500/8600/9500/9600 on ebay, that was a good line. No performas;)
"I went into this film with the attitude that we would capture whatever we could as quickly as we could, and then go back in later and fix and manipulate it. But the ability to do that was far beyond anything I'd imagined; and I think that will affect the way I shoot the next film, with regard to how much time I spend on certain things. We built a little bit more in terms of sets and stuff than we really needed. With this technology, we can keep reducing down the parts that we actually have to build.-George Lucas, on SWe1, in 'Cinefex'
Put it this way: the computers will be melting down 24/7 at full crank until the very last moment. Lucas has reduced principal photography to the importance of something like matte painting- it's no longer anything like the primary creative source for what he's doing. There's a section in this issue of 'Cinefex' that explains how a two-shot between Amidala and Anakin used take one from Jake Lloyd, take seven from Natalie Portman, take 15 from Jake Lloyd so that his mouth closed at the end of the sequence, and a backwards clip of Natalie Portman with steam rotoscoped so that Natalie's glance downward was in reverse but the steam also in the shot was forward!
(wonder if Taco's dweebproofing software will throw away this post for having said 'Natalie Portman'?)
Anyhow, that should give you an idea of what's really happening. At this point, film to Lucas is like samples to a tracker-using music composer- this is not only a new approach, but interestingly it's something that could be approached on the desktop as well (just in much smaller amounts). Once the initial wizbang fun of rendering 30,000 ships or a battlefield with a million footsoldiers has become boring, then we'll start to see what people do with essentially unlimited scope to their imaginations. It's like digital synthesis- contrast modern techno/DnB with early-seventies pop and rock. The capacity to digitally imagine just about any sound (in a sense, anyway) has led to strikingly different genres than anyone could have imagined, ones that use tonality as a key musical element. The capacity to do this with cinematography will lead to strikingly different films, and Lucas may not be the one to pioneer them- but he's doing a lot to establish the new technology.
The GPL is meant to keep the fluidity of information happening. Violation implies an attempt to restrict the flow of information.
The behavior of the RIAA around copyright is meant to freeze the fluidity of information and turn it into the most proprietary stuff imaginable, with jail and fines for violators- violation can mean commercial piracy but more and more often implies the noncommercial, unrestricted flow of information.
How difficult is this to understand? Look at it in terms of information flow and it will make more sense.
Your problem is this: both these actions, the second more than the first even, are classic examples of 'fair use'. The laws about fair use were passed by making them include taxation to the RIAA by way of compensating them for noncommercial copying. However, at the moment the RIAA is going to great lengths to eviscerate fair use, so 'should be allowed' or even 'is allowed' is kind of academic- they frankly don't care if the law says it is okay, they are above the law and they make the law and they say it is not okay and will use anything they can to punish you for it.
In all honesty, and this is after spending half an hour grovelling through google finding references to the Audio Home Recording Act, I'd say: wait a year, ask again. It could be misleading to point you at the actual law when prime movers of that law now repudiate it and act as if it doesn't exist. I think fair use is going bye-bye where not explicitly sanctioned (musicians: explicitly permit fair use of your recordings, if you own the rights!). To tell you the truth about fair use at this point would be misleading- losing those rights is basically inevitable. You'll still be paying a tax on stuff like DAT tapes, though, and CD-Rs labelled for music copying (perhaps all of them, I'm not certain of the exact accounting)
Talk to David Boies or Orrin Hatch. It's yet to be established that this noncommercial _vastly_ _expanded_ fair use copying is illegal. I personally believe it's going to be made illegal, meaning that the Home Recording Act will be repealed for the benefit of the RIAA, and for this reason I've been refusing to make tapes of vinyl record albums for people, since fair use is plainly being discarded and I don't want to set an expectation that I'll have to renege on (that and it's a way to raise the issue of what's currently going on with people who have no idea what's currently going on).
However, until fair use is repealed, it is _not_ illegal, and Napster is a loophole, since nobody imagined fair use copying could be quite _that_ easy or ubitiquous. Please bear that in mind- it's reasonable to ACT on the basis of what the law is GOING to obviously become, but this does not magically mean that it's currently in force. If I didn't have big dreams of running a small business in the area of music creation and distribution, I would be a lot more inclined to push the limits of fair use: for instance, I can demo my recording studio's capabilities by digitally mastering classic old vinyl and making it sound better than the RIAA CD version does, but I choose not to do it as it's _begging_ for harassment.
"There is no market. We give up. It's not possible to be an independent game company. We're off to join the biggest trust we can find, before it bothers to step on us and put us out of business, so that we can still have salaries and feed our families."
Need it be explained that Microsoft set the tone for this situation? There are _plenty_ of industries out there where you can start a business, do good work, and have a future- though the numbers may be decreasing across the board (corporatism, in a word). The game industry is not one of them, apparently. Bungie chose not to die like Looking Glass. The question people should be asking is, do they wish to have companies like Bungie and Looking Glass forced out of the business for the convenience of the larger players? Do they like having their choices wiped out? Just because this effect is prevalent does not make it desirable.
Bungie had been one of the biggest indie developers for some time- that meant they eventually had to go deal with distributors themselves. It was hell, apparently, just awful. The worst part was that Bungie had to put up with all sorts of crap just to get the grand holy distributors to carry their product- distributors which only want to deal with, say, Microsoft and their ilk as it's safer to deal with huge conglomerates and nobody important gets offended.
It's a little like shelf space in a supermarket. Most people don't know what a battlezone that is. Bungie had to know how ugly distribution really was because they depended utterly on being able to do it- well before internet file sharing was as big as it is now. Every step of the way, they faced total failure if one of the 800lb gorillas decided they didn't like Bungie being there.
I don't know how much 'stick' was combined with the 'carrot' MS offered- it hardly matters. Bungie would be able to smell the _shadow_ of a stick. The merest hint of '...or we'll lean on your distributors' and Bungie would cave, knowing better than most companies how weak their lifeline was.
Sure this isn't capitalism- your point? Slashdot readers of all people ought to understand how real barriers to entry can be. The way things work, Bungie had and has no guaranteed access to a free market, the way they were playing it. They wanted the distribution channels that are owned by the larger players, they wanted to be sold in stores and they were.
They got tired of the brinksmanship. I for one won't hold that against them- the stress would have killed me if I was the one daring to do it:) at the same time, I don't expect their products will ever see any platform I use (i.e. Mac or Linux)- yes, I know it's promised for Mac, and I believe this is a lie or deception and that MS will FIND a way to see that Halo doesn't get finished for Mac, even something as simple as setting the priorities so fixing X-Box bugs etc is always more important. And finally, it's somewhat academic for me as I simply won't knowingly buy Microsoft stuff under any circumstances, any more than I'll buy RIAA label CDs at this point. It's a pity, but there it is- the only way you can pretend to defy a trust is by depriving yourself of whatever they are controlling. I will have to choose to not give MS money in the event that Halo manages to ship for Mac. I still don't believe this is likely to happen, though. *shrug* Bungie died, deal with it. They don't even use its name in MS X-Box press releases, did you notice? So much for using Bungie brand recognition.
*g* really. I feel so cheap, I only have about 2x6 (in three separate parts).Must go and get a third jumbo sized one to match the other two so that the mini one can go with the matching corkboard:)
Where do you _get_ a 4x8 sheet of whiteboard? I've been wondering about that...
Hell, this only opens the door to good dedicated small business. It doesn't take much ingenuity to think of a way to make a product that is _not_ a complete scandal and ripoff (for instance, CDs still work- you can make CDs. You can make VideoCDs that play on many DVD players, and if I understand right you can make no-region DVDs if you so choose, and for all these things it's legal to buy big duplicators and do the small business thing).
Don't you see what a great setup this is? I will risk being mocked once again (ha! Piss off, mockers, 'cause I refuse to quit pursuing my dreams just because some dweebs think I'm self-glorifying a lot) to mention that I am getting snazzy CD-Rs printed up- archival 100-year CD-Rs, but the important thing is seven words that are on every single one- "All commercial rights RESERVED- noncommercial copying OKAY". I think this is important enough to write it right on the CDs I'm making- but I'm not so dumb that I don't realise what a killer marketing angle that is. It could provoke a shock of recognition- someone looking at the thing in a store could do a doubletake and instantly decide, 'This must be cool and underground! I should support this!' just because of the pro-copying notice. It predisposes a certain type of person to approve of the CD even if they have no idea what the music is- and might predispose them to like the music more, too- and might lead to word-of-mouth (which is priceless) and you can do this too. If you produce anything you can try to align your interests with the people who are your customers. You don't have to act like Big Media- in fact, it may be suicide. The more Big Media goes absolutely nuts and tightens the screws on consumers, the more pressure is created for a backlash effect- rewarding the people who rebel and refuse to take people's rights, or what people think of as their rights.
If there was no RIAA, no MPAA, no kids being arrested in the middle of the night or having their computers seized by police for music-sharing, then my notion to write 'copying OK' on my CDs would be dumb and meaningless. It is only meaningful in a political context when that very action is getting people arrested and their property seized. But then, it's a seriously powerful message.
That's not really that hard. When content is so ubitiquous that it's too cheap to meter, then _attention_ becomes the desperately valuable commodity. People are increasingly chased down and surrounded by ads, hype, spam, all desperately seeking ATTENTION and rarely finding it. The usual reaction to this is to seek stuff that isn't just hype- for content, this would mean _good_ stuff. For music- perhaps the Beatles. For a TV show- Monty Python, Red Dwarf, or for a docu-TV show, 'Roots' or the 'Connections' series.
Hype never cares whether the thing is bad or good- everything is equally overhyped until it becomes meaningless, and if you're not lucky the stuff itself becomes subservient to the hype- content gets written according to what somebody thinks will sell, rather than what somebody thinks is good. In the music industry this has taken the form of brutally extreme compression until the music is practically one big square-wave- have you _heard_ just how rotten the sound quality of Britney Spears music really is? But it's louder than the competition on Top 40 radio- until someone else comes along and turns up the gain even more, dares to produce even more flat and oversaturated sonics in the name of being louder than the next band. That's desperately seeking attention too- the _bad_ way.
The new business model will likely be about specialisation- and it will certainly be about what's good rather than what's mass market. But the underlying fact is that it will be about attention- getting attention over the din of noisy mass market competition by zeroing in on what particular people CARE about, and delivering that, bigtime. Word of mouth will become madly solicited, but skepticism will rise at the same time when it becomes clear that multinational conglomerates are in fact trying really hard to get your friends to sell you on stuff- and stuff that has integrity will end up with major cult followings on an Internet scale. Look at what happened with Napster- that is a simple product that does what you expect it to- bam, it's a worldwide controversy and threatens entire industries. Napster grew through word-of-mouth and attention... people, in vast numbers, went 'well THIS is worth my time, let's see what we can find!' And they did. If you tried to hype up a comparable service that didn't deliver on the promise as well, nothing would happen...
(damn Netscape's black purulent heart for crashing and killing my previous, better written response)
Okay: you say, "Yet the fact remains that at least some of the artists that do sign get both rich and famous."
Name one.
I went around and found plenty more multiplatinum artists who actually went _bankrupt_ (not just not-rich, filing Chapter 11). TLC, of course (massively multiplatinum. Toni Braxton- would you believe _two_ albums both over 7X platinum at the time she filed for bankruptcy? Remember 'U Can't Touch This'? MC Hammer filed for bankrupcty too. How many more do you need? Plus, you get artists like the Brit band James (platinum, debuted at #1 in brit charts and stayed in top 10 for over 8 weeks) who did commercials for a hotel TO AVOID bankruptcy. The next time you hear music you recognise on a commercial, think for a second- is that artist avoiding being bankrupted by their disgustingly bad contract by turning to the commercial sector? Is this now _expected_ of artists ('you can't earn squat from your quintuple platinum albums but you can do some commercials and _they_ will put food on the table and keep you in nice clothes!')? Why exactly shouldn't a million selling album be enough to keep an artist solvent? This stinks.
To add a bit of detail to the wildly ranging figures we're throwing around, it became fairly customary to spend upwards of a quarter million dollars on- not an artist- a _video_. In this case, sometimes the label only demands half the video expense be recouped! *yay* It's characteristic of the tendency to throw huge amounts of money at the technology of recording- and have the artist recoup most or all of it (in the case of a million-dollar video the artist might be forced to recoup half, rather than all).
The whole thing really does stink. Again- name one artist who's got rich and famous lately- we can then watch that artist's career, and see if they end up declaring bankruptcy, like Toni Braxton, at the peak of two separate septuple-platinum albums. I don't care if they _talk_ like Kid Rock: I'm telling you that very possibly _all_ of these guys are going to end up totally hosed. Name one that isn't- and Metallica doesn't count! They fought the labels every step of the way, and had none of the support you claim is customary!
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're Astroturf :) in any case, why say anything bad about a 'product' that's not likely to ever exist? Every X-Box sale made could be seen as a Windows sale lost. Particularly if MS has success in its antitrust battles, it will abandon X-Box (you're not going to claim they _can't_ _afford_ to scrap all that research? MS 'can't afford'?) which will have served its purpose- keeping PC game development from spreading out to consoles too much.
Of course, it's a good question whether decent PC game development is even feasible anymore, so why say bad things? woo xbox 'yay'. Bit of a moot point isn't it? Let it preside over a decaying empire- if it even ships- hell, let it be a puppet symbol of the strength of the industry, whatEVER.
Interesting stuff and genuine innovation will just have to go on, rough-edged and ill-funded, outside of the commercial sector. What else is new?
Multitrack recording:
- 70s- open-reel tape consoles, $50,000 (?) for 16-24 tracks 30 ips
- 90s- ditto at more like $20,000, first digital multitrack but _seriously_ inadequate $50,000 again.
- Now- 20-24 bit minimum, ADAT available in this class for under $3000, nonlinear DAW recording in a similar pricerange not counting the computer and disk costs. That's for something like Digi Pro Tools: ask the GIS crew about that.
Mixing- 70s- mixing console $10,000? Less tendency for hugeness and a zillion busses.
- 90s- mixing console $10-50,000. This is where huge consoles really took off- also, lower end consoles developed a terrible cheapness and noisiness, moving into the consumer zone. At this time digital consoles were useless even though they cost the earth- early digital consoles featured 16 bit busses and NO dithering. Any home PC can do better these days with the proper software.
- Now- analog consoles same as 90s unless you build your own and know your way around audiophile design- low end's a third as cheap as it used to be, but still very cheesy. Digital consoles becoming available with 24, 36 or even higher bit depths on the busses. DAW a mixed bag- you can do work with deep busses and good software for under $10,000, you can kluge the same thing for under $1000 if you know what you're doing, if you can build circuitry you can get in there with analog gear and match the fluidity but _not_ the noise floor (never underestimate the 'bit depth' of analog- no rounding errors at all, and dithering becomes unnecessary- dithering is actually a type of noise at about -110db!). More than ever it's WHAT you know not what you SPEND- demand is turning back towards high end audio characteristics, and industry standards are slipping. Which brings us to-
Mastering and Release- 70s- ouch! Good luck getting anywhere _near_ this stage. Disc mastering equipment in the millions of dollars, owned only by mastering houses- you simply could not play in this area, not even the recording studios did. There was never a consumer market for vinyl disc mastering.
- 90s- even more ouch! While older equipment would pass into the hands of semipros and rich amateurs for mere hundreds of thousands of dollars (perhaps less), while the Philips cassette became widely available, the top end continued to skyrocket, developing techniques like multiband compression to saturate the tonality of the music while suppressing unruly peaks. The first CD mastering equipment was staggeringly expensive as well. It was an era where there was a huge gap between 'bedroom recording and mastering' and the commercial stuff- you simply couldn't get anywhere near the commercial quality on cassette 4-tracks and 'mastering' to a dubbing cassette deck. For the first time you could do it all yourself, but the technology just wasn't there for other than hobbyist use or demos.
- Now- it gets _interesting_. People are used to assuming that you _must_ be able to spend millions to get state of the art sound- but, $200 CD-R burners? Free or shareware software that mixes and edits in 24 bit depths? You can get software for _free_ today, right now, that substantially beats what was the state of the art in the mid-90s. The technology is there- intensely there. Processes like multiband compression can be replicated in software... everything that used to take $50,000 mastering house equipment is becoming available in software. There's one major exception- monitoring- you _cannot_ do professional mastering work over Yamaha NS-10s, much less PC multimedia speakers or headphones. By the same token, amplification has to be terrific. And even HERE it's becoming accessible! If you aren't fussy, you could get one of the high-end multimedia systems- for instance, the Klipsch Promedia, which can handle substantial monitoring volumes without distorting- and that would be good enough to work with, at under $1000.
Summary Obviously, there's a need for more information out there- at this point it's not money that limits a home-recording musician (if you can get a few thousand dollars over the course of a few years you can assemble the required tools), it's information. You could say, 'get a 20-bit ADAT or a computer-based DAW with at least 24 bit mix busses and a CD burner' but that's like saying 'download EGCS, download the kernel sources- great, now write clustering software for i-openers over infrared ports!'. Mixing is as much a craft as an art and treating it like Jackson Pollock treated a canvas WILL result in dodgy mixes that are obviously not professional- and mastering has long been considered a black art, just as much as writing tricky device drivers! The information also tends to be hoarded, but with the Internet this breaks down a bit- for instance, I've read numerous rants by mastering engineers on how the major labels are getting into an arms race with compression and loudness, which is ruining the enjoyable quality of the sound (think later Britney Spears, and listen to the actual sounds being used- that's ruthlessly overcompressed).So the final answer would be somewhere between two and twenty thousand dollars for the equipment required to produce the high quality recording (some of which you may already have, like a computer and CD burner), BUT it will either cost you a couple years of determined study or another two to twenty thousand dollars to hire someone who can use that gear properly. It's quite like having precision parts machined with a large and powerful machine shop, routers and lathes and stuff- sure if you have the gear you _could_ do it, the question to ask is if you know what you're doing with machine tools. With studios it's 'do you know what you're doing with recording/mastering tools'. The tools themselves are more and more affordable, and even the information is becoming more accessible, but you have to be willing to learn- it's a discipline as demanding as programming, in its own way.
Does that answer the question? *creak of dead-from-boredom people falling over in a shower of dust* ;)
Regarding the error in law, clearly this is what the MS guys are after- the question is, to what end? I wonder if they really expect a slap on the wrist, or think they can make insincere pledges of good faith at this point. The question that comes to my mind is this: might the appeals court entirely reject Jackson's breakup idea, instead choosing to be 'nice' by leaving MS in one piece- and imposing a web of REGULATION? It's hard to see how many other answers there would be. In a lot of ways MS would be better off broken up- I saw another poster expressing gratitude that they would not 'metastasize', and the analogy is both jarring and apt. Perhaps we're all better off if they are _not_ broken up, if they remain monolithic.
With only one company, it's more like 'fascism' or the classic Cold War version of 'communism'- you cannot blithely separate industry from government if one entity of industry runs everything.
There are many mechanisms by which a company (particularly in information technology) can leverage its existing strengths to add more strengths and use all this strength not to help its customers but to screw competitors. Microsoft's illustrated this nicely and will no doubt have entire chapters of future history books, next to Standard Oil and the railroads and Ma Bell. Sort of the 'rabid weasel' variant of a classic trust- a literal version of 'network effects!
If such a company manages to screw everybody else badly enough that there's no point even trying to do business in the field being controlled, then there is no more capitalist market in that field- see point 1, repeat until you have a clue, because...
It ain't a 'market' if you can't comparison shop! :)
In fact, if killing you will earn/save them more money than they would be fined for doing so, the corporation is _obligated_ to kill you! Isn't fiduciary duty wonderful? Isn't it neat to be able to afford lawyers that can finally make the penalties of criminal negligence cheaper than redesigning that gas tank, testing those tires, inspecting that food product? Isn't it just WIZZA PEACHY KEENO that fiduciary duty obliges the corporation to kill people if that gains shareholders more money than fixing the problems?
Criminal negligence- it's not just a good idea, it's the law! :P
(steps aside to watch the battle between '+1 insightful' and '-1 troll' with a couple of really sick bastards chiming in as '+1 funny' :) )
I don't have any faith that Gore would be that much better than Bush. Why do you? I'm not certain Nader would be much use either- but he is _different_ and coming from outside the two party system, besides which his agenda about corporations and trusts is very clear and mirrors my own. I am absolutely certain about who I want to be counted for at this point, and it doesn't matter so much that he's not super likely to win. A vote for Nader is notice of one more person who's _really_ against corpocracy. That record will stand, and the other politicians are very aware of these things. It puts them ALL on notice. If I voted for Gore, it would be meaningless- nothing about that says what I want to say with a vote. Even if he wins there's no way to tell I actually cared about something- 'anti-Bush' isn't much of an agenda and sends no message. 'actually voted for Nader, dammit!' damn well sends a message, win or lose.
The problem is, if it genuinely looks like the popular opinion's gone against Gates, all that bribe money goes for naught- the politician blithely doublecrosses the special interest in order to get re-elected. This would go for even Bush- if it looked like he was going to lose power and influence because he was easily painted as the puppet of MS, he would of course avoid helping them and possibly even hurt them to show he was not beholden. Therefore, paint him the puppet of MS, and see how much of that he's able to take. It _is_ an effective political attack.
And remember that the whole idea of .net is to put software on a pay-per-use basis in the long run? The idea of changing consumers from a 'spend loads of money being forced to buy software' basis to a 'spend loads of money being allowed to use software you don't even get to keep' is only appealing to the stockholders- it's a loser of an idea to the consumer, who wants to believe they are getting stuff that will last forever and always remain useful- and THAT is the major (false) promise of MS software, that you get it and it will ALWAYS remain useful and NEVER go out of style or become unsupported because it's MS! MS is _always_ supported *cough, cough*
What might be happening is the final phase of the scorched earth policy. The underground (linux, MacOS, Be etc) thrives, and there's only so far MS can really push- they can only make Windows legally compulsory in an indirect way, for instance creating a climate where banking software, election voting software etc. is Windows-only because nobody thinks it's worth bothering to develop such software for anything else. If they try to go further and, say, get legislation passed to ban Macs and Linux from the Internet (using some trumped-up argument) they will fail- it would be demanding so much that nobody would go along with it. If they succeeded, people would ignore those laws. There really is only so far that they can go with their monopoly, which is a bad thing for them as their business model is still based on ravenous expansion without limits- they are heading for a fall when it's time for them to reach an equilibrium and stop growing, because they're so utterly not based on sustaining business, only on expanding it. I would even say there is a chance of their overextending and collapsing, for business reasons only- what if they held a .net and nobody came? Well, first they'd doctor the PR and doctor the accounting and insist that everything was working- the most dangerous thing they could do, yet the most likely. Then, having run the stakes up to immense heights this way, they'd be facing- the IRS, over the accounting they'd done, and the press (what remains of it) over their deceptions, all without having got enough _genuine_ mindshare to maintain a survivable business- and remember MS is prone to obsoleting their old stuff to move you to the new stuff. If they can't do that they've just sabotaged themselves.
The government's direct action just might be unnecessary...
Hey, I could go for that. That's the best argument I've heard yet for getting involved enough to vote Nader. It only takes 15% to get the Green Party in there with the Dems and Reps? I'm there. Hell with holding out for grandiose effects like getting Nader elected president (he'd probably be assassinated! :P ), I like the idea of contributing toward proving a _three_ party (or more) system is needed. It is.
Can't they at least steal the basic shape of NASA's X-24 lifting body? (the photograph in the article is the X-24, not 'Kitten'!) That flies- their illustrations would not, not if you strapped Shuttle boosters to them.
Yeesh- I've had my airplane designs recently sassed as 'stoner aerodynamics', but _this_ is _ridiculous_. What would that be then, quaalude aerodynamics? :)
Come to think of it, wouldn't it be interesting to have a plane with _one_ GE high-bypass fanjet between two fuselages? hmmmmm (reading Slashdot has a tendency to give me ideas for cool aircraft to design- last time it was the 'flying train' ground-effect vehicle getting me to design a landspeeder- very wide rear wing and narrower canard producing a tendency to hold a fixed altitude at around treetop height and avoid the ground. I didn't quite get it so it could hurtle over rolling terrain with no pilot input, but it is a hell of a lot easier to mow the grass with this one than with any traditional aircraft :)
I can't help but think of how essentially geeky X-Plane really is- I _do_ think it's the best flight sim out there, but then I do things like read 'Wide-Body: the making of the Boeing 747' for fun and then design a plane a bit larger than a Lear Jet, as plausibly as possible, with two GE high-bypass fanjets dwarfing the fuselage and hurling it through the air at up to Mach 1, and then flight-test it and fix the aerodynamic problems :)
_Most_ people want to shoot down stuff or play airline pilot, not design airplanes using blade element modelling. It's very much like games like RoboWar (not an official link, a design page)- the popular appeal of something this geeky is basically nil, but for those who are willing to be captivated by the technical challenge, the depth of the game becomes phenomenal. It's like that with X-Plane, because it's basically a full-on blade element modelling aerodynamic simulator with killer eye candy for $80, something the real aircraft designers would have killed for (as an initial rough-draft tool) twenty years ago.
To be playing with this sort of thing on a home computer is beyond anything I could have imagined as a kid drawing pictures of weird airplanes instead of doing homework :)
- Color calibration. This is very obvious but what the hey. 1.8 gamma works very well- gamma correction is global throughout the OS and not just confined to an app or two (the calibration instructions for Photoshop on Windows involve, among other things, opening an image in IE and the same image in Photoshop and adjusting them until they match! WTF?)
- Applications. There's an awful lot of cheesy little GFX and audio and midi apps out there for Mac. Some of the cheesiest ones are the best ones. There's been a lot of little flybynight companies making amazing things for Mac and vanishing. I still have some of those products and they still kick butt. First one that comes to mind is HVS Color- a bizarre color reduction Photoshop plugin that has a formidably geeky control panel letting you weight the algorithms various ways. There's 'Megalomania', a really old MIDI patch-bay program that lets you do really nutty things like patch every other note through feedback delay pitch shifters with random velocity changes
:) I make frequent use of SoundEffects 0.9.2 (dunno if it ever reached 1.0!) which is a fantastic digital audio editor that has some wild bandpass/cut filters for it and is a whole audio workshop for free download. So much of this is wacked in some way and yet, how cool it is and how useful it can be...
- Stability. No, I don't mean 'not crashing' more's the pity- put it this way. I only very recently got a CD-R and began making backups of my critical files. Why? Because I knew enough about patching together working MacOSes that I honestly felt the machine could not die in such a way that I lost data. (Doh!) The funny part is, when a partition _did_ eat itself so severely that all the files went bye-bye, I freaked for a minute, then went in with Unerase and salvaged all the 'resource' files: which happened to contain _all_ the 'clipping' files that I'd been keeping important notes in. Every last one! And later I dropped them all on a creator-type-changer app and turned them all right back into clippings again and they all work as if nothing had happened. I am, needless to say, seriously sold on using clippings to keep important bits of textual data in now
:)
- Related: repairability. Most of the Mac graphics people have actually learned as much voodoo as they'd need to run Linux- it's just different sorts, just enough to be able to maintain their own machines in all emergencies. A guy charging a lot to do GFX work on a Mac might still have it crash on him but very likely can recover from just about anything in less than three to six hours. If you're on deadline that's very important. This is something Linux can offer as well as it also lends itself to being maintained by the user (given a pro user).
- Built-in functionality: I'm on an older powermac. Having built-in SCSI is probably why I got stupid and believed my disks could not die
;) it also does a great job doing demanding audio or video capture stuff. The audio circuitry gets very close to Digi third-party boards- it's quite a ways beyond Sound Blaster levels, must be using better ADCs or something.
- Damn near realtime capabilities- this is the flip side of the well known Mac lack of PMT. If the menu doesn't respond to your click, oh how tiresome. However, if the menu doesn't respond to your click because you're doing _midi_ sequencing and to run system tasks would make a MIDI event happen many milliseconds late- that's very different. If you've ever sequenced on a Mac so slow that it takes 10 seconds to not even completely redraw the screen- meantime pumping out hard, solid, perfectly timed MIDI information to your synthesizers- then you'll understand. I now have an older 68040 mac dedicated to MIDI. It's overkill
:) by the same token, on the Powermac demanding video or audio capture is a cinch- it just freezes up the machine until it's done. CD burns, ditto- all these sorts of things essentially say 'I am realtime priority!' and seize the machine to make sure they don't have a single bobble. Which is surely annoying- but if they _are_ super high priority, then those processes are right.
- Fun stupid stuff: I noticed that the GIS crew have already put 'Gravite' on their audio workstation Mac. It's a control panel that makes icons dangle under your pointer when you pick them up. Also you can fling them using a hotkey and if you let go the key as it hits the trash, it actually places the icon in the trash! I'm currently running Kaleidoscope and Smoothtype (extremely heavy theming and antialiasing, respectively- heavy theming means the designs can be entirely ludicrous and fanciful) which are quite good at dispelling the relentless sameness of MacOS. There's lots of other interface hacks, some dreadful and fatal and others innocuous. All can be installed and uninstalled just by dragging icons around and rebooting- when I lost the HD it was after something like two years of relentless hammering and altering on the same system, without ever starting afresh. I understand Windows boxes slow to a crawl after a couple years of continuous use with lots of installing and altering and breaking and fixing
:)
Ok, that was _way_ more than you ever wanted to know. I'd just like to confirm this complaining emulator writer in one thing- if you get a mac get an old one on eBay! Never assume that you must upgrade upgrade upgrade- you're better off identifying stuff that you want to do and building a system around it. Most software that's worth a crap _won't_ make you change or patch your system- if it tries, get rid of it, run Macsbug and if it installs stuff and says 'Reboot now (OK)' and there's no 'no, that's not OK!' button, cackle and hit 'cmd-power' and drop into the low level debugger and go 'es' (escape to shell) and get rid of whatever got added.But I digress. Anyhow you can probably get an entire mac for less than he'd be selling that emulator for :) try 7500/7600/8500/8600/9500/9600 on ebay, that was a good line. No performas ;)
Put it this way: the computers will be melting down 24/7 at full crank until the very last moment. Lucas has reduced principal photography to the importance of something like matte painting- it's no longer anything like the primary creative source for what he's doing. There's a section in this issue of 'Cinefex' that explains how a two-shot between Amidala and Anakin used take one from Jake Lloyd, take seven from Natalie Portman, take 15 from Jake Lloyd so that his mouth closed at the end of the sequence, and a backwards clip of Natalie Portman with steam rotoscoped so that Natalie's glance downward was in reverse but the steam also in the shot was forward!
(wonder if Taco's dweebproofing software will throw away this post for having said 'Natalie Portman'?)
Anyhow, that should give you an idea of what's really happening. At this point, film to Lucas is like samples to a tracker-using music composer- this is not only a new approach, but interestingly it's something that could be approached on the desktop as well (just in much smaller amounts). Once the initial wizbang fun of rendering 30,000 ships or a battlefield with a million footsoldiers has become boring, then we'll start to see what people do with essentially unlimited scope to their imaginations. It's like digital synthesis- contrast modern techno/DnB with early-seventies pop and rock. The capacity to digitally imagine just about any sound (in a sense, anyway) has led to strikingly different genres than anyone could have imagined, ones that use tonality as a key musical element. The capacity to do this with cinematography will lead to strikingly different films, and Lucas may not be the one to pioneer them- but he's doing a lot to establish the new technology.
The behavior of the RIAA around copyright is meant to freeze the fluidity of information and turn it into the most proprietary stuff imaginable, with jail and fines for violators- violation can mean commercial piracy but more and more often implies the noncommercial, unrestricted flow of information.
How difficult is this to understand? Look at it in terms of information flow and it will make more sense.
In all honesty, and this is after spending half an hour grovelling through google finding references to the Audio Home Recording Act, I'd say: wait a year, ask again. It could be misleading to point you at the actual law when prime movers of that law now repudiate it and act as if it doesn't exist. I think fair use is going bye-bye where not explicitly sanctioned (musicians: explicitly permit fair use of your recordings, if you own the rights!). To tell you the truth about fair use at this point would be misleading- losing those rights is basically inevitable. You'll still be paying a tax on stuff like DAT tapes, though, and CD-Rs labelled for music copying (perhaps all of them, I'm not certain of the exact accounting)
However, until fair use is repealed, it is _not_ illegal, and Napster is a loophole, since nobody imagined fair use copying could be quite _that_ easy or ubitiquous. Please bear that in mind- it's reasonable to ACT on the basis of what the law is GOING to obviously become, but this does not magically mean that it's currently in force. If I didn't have big dreams of running a small business in the area of music creation and distribution, I would be a lot more inclined to push the limits of fair use: for instance, I can demo my recording studio's capabilities by digitally mastering classic old vinyl and making it sound better than the RIAA CD version does, but I choose not to do it as it's _begging_ for harassment.
This looks like Windows.
Exactly like Windows.
What's changed?
Need it be explained that Microsoft set the tone for this situation? There are _plenty_ of industries out there where you can start a business, do good work, and have a future- though the numbers may be decreasing across the board (corporatism, in a word). The game industry is not one of them, apparently. Bungie chose not to die like Looking Glass. The question people should be asking is, do they wish to have companies like Bungie and Looking Glass forced out of the business for the convenience of the larger players? Do they like having their choices wiped out? Just because this effect is prevalent does not make it desirable.
It's a little like shelf space in a supermarket. Most people don't know what a battlezone that is. Bungie had to know how ugly distribution really was because they depended utterly on being able to do it- well before internet file sharing was as big as it is now. Every step of the way, they faced total failure if one of the 800lb gorillas decided they didn't like Bungie being there.
I don't know how much 'stick' was combined with the 'carrot' MS offered- it hardly matters. Bungie would be able to smell the _shadow_ of a stick. The merest hint of '...or we'll lean on your distributors' and Bungie would cave, knowing better than most companies how weak their lifeline was.
Sure this isn't capitalism- your point? Slashdot readers of all people ought to understand how real barriers to entry can be. The way things work, Bungie had and has no guaranteed access to a free market, the way they were playing it. They wanted the distribution channels that are owned by the larger players, they wanted to be sold in stores and they were.
They got tired of the brinksmanship. I for one won't hold that against them- the stress would have killed me if I was the one daring to do it :) at the same time, I don't expect their products will ever see any platform I use (i.e. Mac or Linux)- yes, I know it's promised for Mac, and I believe this is a lie or deception and that MS will FIND a way to see that Halo doesn't get finished for Mac, even something as simple as setting the priorities so fixing X-Box bugs etc is always more important. And finally, it's somewhat academic for me as I simply won't knowingly buy Microsoft stuff under any circumstances, any more than I'll buy RIAA label CDs at this point. It's a pity, but there it is- the only way you can pretend to defy a trust is by depriving yourself of whatever they are controlling. I will have to choose to not give MS money in the event that Halo manages to ship for Mac. I still don't believe this is likely to happen, though. *shrug* Bungie died, deal with it. They don't even use its name in MS X-Box press releases, did you notice? So much for using Bungie brand recognition.
Where do you _get_ a 4x8 sheet of whiteboard? I've been wondering about that...
Don't you see what a great setup this is? I will risk being mocked once again (ha! Piss off, mockers, 'cause I refuse to quit pursuing my dreams just because some dweebs think I'm self-glorifying a lot) to mention that I am getting snazzy CD-Rs printed up- archival 100-year CD-Rs, but the important thing is seven words that are on every single one- "All commercial rights RESERVED- noncommercial copying OKAY". I think this is important enough to write it right on the CDs I'm making- but I'm not so dumb that I don't realise what a killer marketing angle that is. It could provoke a shock of recognition- someone looking at the thing in a store could do a doubletake and instantly decide, 'This must be cool and underground! I should support this!' just because of the pro-copying notice. It predisposes a certain type of person to approve of the CD even if they have no idea what the music is- and might predispose them to like the music more, too- and might lead to word-of-mouth (which is priceless) and you can do this too. If you produce anything you can try to align your interests with the people who are your customers. You don't have to act like Big Media- in fact, it may be suicide. The more Big Media goes absolutely nuts and tightens the screws on consumers, the more pressure is created for a backlash effect- rewarding the people who rebel and refuse to take people's rights, or what people think of as their rights.
If there was no RIAA, no MPAA, no kids being arrested in the middle of the night or having their computers seized by police for music-sharing, then my notion to write 'copying OK' on my CDs would be dumb and meaningless. It is only meaningful in a political context when that very action is getting people arrested and their property seized. But then, it's a seriously powerful message.
Hype never cares whether the thing is bad or good- everything is equally overhyped until it becomes meaningless, and if you're not lucky the stuff itself becomes subservient to the hype- content gets written according to what somebody thinks will sell, rather than what somebody thinks is good. In the music industry this has taken the form of brutally extreme compression until the music is practically one big square-wave- have you _heard_ just how rotten the sound quality of Britney Spears music really is? But it's louder than the competition on Top 40 radio- until someone else comes along and turns up the gain even more, dares to produce even more flat and oversaturated sonics in the name of being louder than the next band. That's desperately seeking attention too- the _bad_ way.
The new business model will likely be about specialisation- and it will certainly be about what's good rather than what's mass market. But the underlying fact is that it will be about attention- getting attention over the din of noisy mass market competition by zeroing in on what particular people CARE about, and delivering that, bigtime. Word of mouth will become madly solicited, but skepticism will rise at the same time when it becomes clear that multinational conglomerates are in fact trying really hard to get your friends to sell you on stuff- and stuff that has integrity will end up with major cult followings on an Internet scale. Look at what happened with Napster- that is a simple product that does what you expect it to- bam, it's a worldwide controversy and threatens entire industries. Napster grew through word-of-mouth and attention... people, in vast numbers, went 'well THIS is worth my time, let's see what we can find!' And they did. If you tried to hype up a comparable service that didn't deliver on the promise as well, nothing would happen...
Okay: you say, "Yet the fact remains that at least some of the artists that do sign get both rich and famous."
Name one.
I went around and found plenty more multiplatinum artists who actually went _bankrupt_ (not just not-rich, filing Chapter 11). TLC, of course (massively multiplatinum. Toni Braxton- would you believe _two_ albums both over 7X platinum at the time she filed for bankruptcy? Remember 'U Can't Touch This'? MC Hammer filed for bankrupcty too. How many more do you need? Plus, you get artists like the Brit band James (platinum, debuted at #1 in brit charts and stayed in top 10 for over 8 weeks) who did commercials for a hotel TO AVOID bankruptcy. The next time you hear music you recognise on a commercial, think for a second- is that artist avoiding being bankrupted by their disgustingly bad contract by turning to the commercial sector? Is this now _expected_ of artists ('you can't earn squat from your quintuple platinum albums but you can do some commercials and _they_ will put food on the table and keep you in nice clothes!')? Why exactly shouldn't a million selling album be enough to keep an artist solvent? This stinks.
To add a bit of detail to the wildly ranging figures we're throwing around, it became fairly customary to spend upwards of a quarter million dollars on- not an artist- a _video_. In this case, sometimes the label only demands half the video expense be recouped! *yay* It's characteristic of the tendency to throw huge amounts of money at the technology of recording- and have the artist recoup most or all of it (in the case of a million-dollar video the artist might be forced to recoup half, rather than all).
The whole thing really does stink. Again- name one artist who's got rich and famous lately- we can then watch that artist's career, and see if they end up declaring bankruptcy, like Toni Braxton, at the peak of two separate septuple-platinum albums. I don't care if they _talk_ like Kid Rock: I'm telling you that very possibly _all_ of these guys are going to end up totally hosed. Name one that isn't- and Metallica doesn't count! They fought the labels every step of the way, and had none of the support you claim is customary!