There's another parallel, though perhaps a bit controversial- in online multiplayer flightsims it's possible to have 'easy mode' in play. Warbirds spent much time with mixed easy and full realism in the main arena where everybody wanted to be- and it really got in the way.
It's like this. The idea of easy mode is that you can't stall or black out or red out, but also you don't have quite the turning ability of full realism. It would appear at first glance that this gives a big advantage to 'real pilots' flying full realism. But! A game like Warbirds is _very_ intensely modelled. Blackouts, redouts, stalls are significant challenges, quite demanding to cope with in heavy combat- you have to maintain 'situational awareness' of not only the enemies but also the state of your own aircraft or you _will_ blow your energy and end up unable to maneuver, or even crash.
To add to that, there are whole maneuvers entirely based on making the other person lose their SA, for instance doing a climbing spiral away from a Focke-Wulf (which has very nasty and violent departure characteristics). If you can get the FW hungry enough to get a shot at you, and you're maintaining the climbing spiral, you can get him to try to pull up, and snap into a really _nasty_ spin and fall, whereupon you swoop down and pounce...
...unless of course he is in easy mode, in which case you are meat: the entire point of your historically accurate defensive maneuver is negated. Same if you're taking off from an embattled field (like a silly bugger, but it's fun) and roaring about ten feet off the deck dogfighting with people- it's amazingly exciting to be doing this and fighting to hang on to the air in incredibly hostile situations, but when you know some of those people swooping around ten feet off the deck are in arcade-game mode and will _not_ have to worry about blowing E or pulling too many Gs, blacking out and digging in a wingtip, it really sours the whole thing.
I was never that great at gunnery but I'm a natural stickjock:) my love is the barnstorming, flinging a plane around madly and doing the unexpected. When I flew Air Warrior I had about a 50% chance of evading _anybody_ if I was freaked out enough, because I'd fly totally nuts and force them to black out trying to keep up with me! The whole mad-inverted-immel-to-ten-inches-off-the-ground routine. I'd also teach people how to fly and maneuver ("OK, we are at 10,000 feet. It will take you 20 seconds even to _reach_ the ground. Now turn real tight and keep the nose _way_ below the horizon, and this time you won't stall!";) )
There was this one time that I, in my dweebfire^Hspit, went after this cargo plane in Warbirds, figuring it was going to be a piece of cake. Well- wow! It noticed me and began flipping around like mad, sudden fierce maneuvers that I couldn't believe the guy didn't black out, it was all over the place and I, in my overpowered Spitfire, was clinging to the air by sheer force of will, wrestling the beast around about ten feet off the ground and staying on the guy for maybe ten minutes, pinging him repeatedly, basically putting in an amazing performance of virtuoso planehandling- and when he vanished over a hill and I lost him, I had to say over the radio, "Whoever was flying that Junkers- wow, man, good show!"
...this was just a few days _before_ I learned about the easy mode options that let him do what he did by merely yanking around the stick like he was playing Mario Party without ever blacking out or stalling... 95% of turning rate isn't as much as a full-on 100% full realism turning rate, but when you can slam into it without paying attention and throw the plane from -95% to 95% in a tenth of a second by just banging the stick against its stops, well, we're talking about a Situational Awareness advantage that will just break down the spirit of anyone still trying to play the game as a sim with the full demands of an aircraft.
Cheating comes in many forms, but the point is, it kills the fun of the game. You want to be playing in the same universe as your opponents. It's just as spirit-breaking if you were in EverCr^Hquest and went up against some guy who spent $10,000 on having a character that could stomp anybody- and goes around doing so. Or against some group staking out an item so they can sell it on eBay. *shrug* these things need to be dealt with one way or another...
Actually, most artworks take discipline. Rock bands, theater companies, dance troupes- it's almost a given that working in groups you need to think 'group' enough to not create chaos.
I do agree that the majority of groups, bands, or backyard movie productions _will_ fail from lack of discipline. But there are a _lot_ of groups, bands, and there will be a lot of backyard movie productions. As these things become attainable certain artists/groups will develop cult followings- those are the ones to watch. You just need to learn where to look to spot them, as they will not have the promotion muscle of a stultified industry looking for one big hit to do tonnage on. I'm saying that situation is artificial and doesn't meet consumer's needs very well- it's natural to differentiate more than that. There will probably always be a market for blockbusters as well- even if it mutates into a 'pay 100$ (or 1000$?) to don black tie and go to see a movie' in special luxury theaters.
This is of course exactly my argument- that the requirement of huge sums of money to (say) make a CD, is characteristic of an _era_ and not inherent to the activity. I say that w.r.t making movies, this will end up taking time and effort but not money. You seem to be saying that there will always be a need for huge sums of money spent in huge industries to produce huge meaningful artworks like The Pokemon Movie (ok, low blow there;) ).
How much does it change your perspective _knowing_ that there are artists in any given field who will eat dirt and ramen noodles for years, decades, if doing so lets them create _their_ artwork? The complexity limitation does not need to be overcome because people have _always_ been prone to go to extremes in their hobbies and arts. A madly romantic, obsessed hobbyist is better than the most highly paid hack. The complexities professionals deal with are far beyond the laymen, but there are always madmen out there so beyond the professionals that it'd give you whiplash just thinking about it- this is the apex of art and craft, where they merge. For once I don't even have to use myself as an example- compare Linux kernel hackers to, say, VBA programmers for fortune 500 companies, or whoever implemented Clippy or Microsoft Bob. Put not your trust in 'professionals';) at least, not to the extent that they are your yardstick. This is what concerns me about your argument- you continue to make a case for the big industries of the last century. Even in their heyday, these came down to individual artistic visions. Hitchcock. Lucas. David O. Selznick...
And David O. Selznick is _dead_. The starmaking apparatus he exemplified and personified needs to die now too. It's doing nothing but Pokemon and Ricky Martin, Hootie and maybe a bit of Hanson just for giggles. That's where the safe money is, and it's a crime against art to reduce it to strictly "is this the biggest monetary reward at the end?".
Naturally there will be exceptions, but I am far from convinced there is _any_ justification for assuming the necessity for huge sums of money, the 'blockbuster' movie or 'top 40' song. Who _needs_ to see a blockbuster movie or hear a top 40 song? Who would really be harmed if these things vanished and media became much more localised and focussed in on particular areas of interest? Is there even a need for a full-length movie? If the answer is 'yes, the length is important' then why not a 27 hour movie? The forms media has fallen into are impossibly stereotyped and restrictive. They will crack... and shatter...
Only a bit- disk space issues. I have only two 2.1g IBM SCSI hard drives, each of which is partitioned in thirds. I've managed to fit a Linux install into one of the thirds. I wasn't aware I could even _get_ a BeOS for PowerMac anymore, short of going out and buying it. To make matters worse I'm running a G3 upgrade on it:)
When you reach the point where you can do "Gone With The Wind" with a cast of thousands entirely on a computer, in a week of work and a week of rendering (i.e. give it another 50 years), why is it still necessary to have Hollywood?
To some extent you're pre-supposing a scarcity of resources. One of the major points in the explosion of technology is that this scarcity isn't continuing. I can tell you that for less total money than some of you put into your PCs, I as a musician and sound engineer (www.mp3.com/ChrisJ for obligatory examples:) ) am able to produce completed work that, technically, kills a lot of stuff released by the mainstream industry throughout history, and on top of that I have access to types of tools that the engineers of the 50s and 60s and 70s would have killed for.
On top of this I have access to global distribution simply due to my using the mp3 format, which is popular and downloadable, so not even _distribution_ is an insuperable problem.
If I have access to all this for so little money, a level of production and distribution that _used_ to require not only million dollar recording studios and mastering houses but also fleets of trucks and distributors, doesn't that say something about how the rules are changing?
And if I can (through a lot of years of study and work and a certain amount of saving and buying and a lot of mad hacking of equipment) do this NOW, what does that suggest about the future prospects of indie film directors and actors and cinematographers as the technology advances to the point where essentially anything imaginable becomes 'filmable', not for billions of dollars but out of the home?
I would humbly argue that 'consumer-grade' camcorders will eventually beat Cinemascope given enough years- and I will stubbornly argue that, given a world full of people to draw on, there is going to be a _lot_ of stuff out there more interesting than backyards and dogs. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that only through media cartels can real Art be created- and... *g* well, maybe that _is_ what some people are suggesting, but my God, such a thought!
Absolutely. I not only release free (GPL) software, I also have no less than five albums of music out there to be downloaded freely (www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW, which is MY choice to do that).
The big error, the big oversight here is the unspoken assumption that "because you make something, you can find a market for it". That's, unfortunately, bullshit... certainly both in computer software and in music, the market is distorted by bigger players who control access to distribution and promotion. This is so obvious that people don't see it, it's taken for granted that a cartel totally dictates what you can market in these industries. Yet, it presents a nasty barrier for entry, and blocks the use of capitalism by individuals.
I do music because I like to- I like making it, I can usually pick out something of mine that about anybody would like (it varies a great deal- which is a negative, if you're a cartel: I'm not supposed to be a working artist, I'm supposed to be an easily categorisable disposable artist to be squeezed dry in a single burst of major exposure, then ditched). The thing to remember about my music freeness, determination to make _everything_ downloadable without penalty and withhold nothing, determination to cooperate with anybody who wants to use sampling and take bits of my music for their own use without compensation- is that, just maybe, I have a clearer idea of the real issues here than a lot of people who still believe there's a free market for music (or software).
As I see it- promotion is _everything_. Being known, being publically recognized, is infinitely more valuable than trying to coerce a return on particular artworks or programs- because it is the only thing that can stand against the forces of a cartel controlling the relevant industry. If you are going all business, make a little record label and hammer out good relationships with some stores and pressing houses and a studio and mastering house- guess what? You can't force the cartels to give you distribution. You are _completely_ outmatched there. It is _impossible_ to pursue a 'push' model of product distribution in the face of industry cartels- and if that's where you've put your energies, you're doomed.
If you go all 'free' you're pursuing a 'pull' model. How many really gifted Linux programmers are starving right now? By the same token I see 'free music' as the _only_ reasonable choice (even to the extent that I'll happily talk about all that and tip other people off to it- and I'm told by other people doing this that it actually works!). Instead of 'give, and depend on the gratitude of fans' being a dumb idealistic approach, it is actually the only bulletproof approach- because it is a 'pull' model. You _can't_ force people to listen to and buy your music when you're up against cartels- but no matter how outmatched you are, you can _give_ it away and if people are so happy that they want to help you, nothing can stop them! (speaking of which, did you go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and download a bunch of free music yet?;) )
I'm totally, dead serious. In some ways I'm claiming a pretty serious breakdown of capitalism, that it's not possible for an individual to push their product onto the market in the usual business sense. I _am_ claiming that. But I'm also advocating the solution, which is that in an era of such great connectivity, exposure and ability to get attention are far more valuable than the ability to get your stuff _shoved_ on people- when your horizon is as large as the world, suddenly _everyone_ is 'shoving' their crap onto you, and it all blurs and becomes totally valueless and meaningless. Truth becomes incomprehensible when people will say anything to con you ('innovation'), and in that condition the ability of some small capitalist to get their _demand_ through becomes nil. You can't out-hard-sell a planet full of cartels.
But! As Linux has shown, with this global horizon, there's the capacity for little pockets of generosity and no-strings-attached sincere stuff to get attention, even in the face of the constant deafening roar of the cartels and media. Somebody says, "Hey- didja know you can download all the source for linux and hack with it and you're _allowed_ to?". In the same spirit I say, "Didja know you can download _all_ of my songs on all my (buyable) CDs totally free and not only are you allowed to, I'm kind of passionate that you should never _have_ to cough up money for 'em?" It's partly the simple idealism of "Screw this hucksterism, I want to give stuff", but in some cases (certainly mine) there's also "Things have gone so far out of balance that now, not only do I _want_ to give stuff, but it's the only possible way to earn supporters".
And so, off I go- not only producing good music and stubbornly making it freely available, but also publically offering access to the master tapes for anyone who wants samples, and in fact on Slashdot I've repeatedly offered to let opensource programmer types record music in my studio (you get here, I can't do roadtrips) for FREE when I could legitimately charge $75 an hour, easy. I still offer that- anybody wanting should talk to me. I'm also offering free access to the Geeks In Space people. It's hard to know what more I could offer, but if I think of anything I shall offer that as well:) because (a) I get a kick out of it and like being that way, and (b) again, I see a benefit in it for me, a _social_ benefit not a coercing one. The more I can give the more valuable I become and the more likely it is that I'll keep busy, start doing more work with others, to the point where eventually I can ask $75 an hour sound engineering and it'll seem like an incredible bargain- or have 1% of music listeners buy my ($5.99) CD and have that amount to a cozy nest-egg.
But the important thing is that that doesn't come first. It can _only_ happen if I give so well that it's appreciated, if I work hard enough to be able to really offer something.
So final anti-hype- if anyone could go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and give suggestions on what _more_ I can do to give something valuable to people for nothing, I'd be real pleased:) I'm starting work on a techno album which will be pretty unusual, and need to fit in some equipment building in the form of a fancy EQ for my drum sounds. More albums? Better terms for offering studio time? Do people want schematics for the equipment I'm building, or the modifications I make to the gear I have? As might be imagined I'm holding nothing back whatsoever- and like it that way. So, anything else people want?
In fairness, this is partly sheer pragmatism- mp3.com, which is hosting that >170M of files for me, _requires_ 128K. as to Lame, I've been reading about it for months now. I just don't feel I'm a good enough programmer to make a build of it on MacOS, even using the simple hacks that are available to fake a console environment with a simple window to put stdout in- I would try if I had half a clue, but C coding is still quite beyond me. I've got no intrinsic loyalty to Blade- do you know of anyone who's done any work on bringing Lame to the mac, or is it a 'you should be using your linux partition for that' which makes a sort of sense but is a lot of trouble to go to for a minor improvement in the sound quality of an admittedly compromised format at an inadequate bitrate?:)
I _really_ like this guy's attitude. My initial reaction was "But I have five CDs worth of songs released as mp3!", with concern about whether this could be used as a weapon to hurt mp3 and damage the viability of _any_ unrestricted digital music format (I specifically mean 'unrestricted for people to download', i.e. no 'security features', I don't mean unrestricted for the programmer)
Then, reading the inventor's interview, I was blown away by how good his attitude was. He GPLs: I GPL. He _specifically_ and eloquently objects to the notion of 'security features'. He's clearly coming from an audiophile sort of place- I'd given up hope of finding that in compressed digital music at _all_- I currently like mp3s because they distort pretty smoothly and unaggressively, the attempt to deliver 'bright clear spectacular highs' will inevitably produce horrid distortions and breakup, just as it does in hardware and analog audio, only much worse. Now here's somebody with an actual clue concerning himself with issues that mean a great deal to me! Wow. I kinda like that.
My take on the matter as an active and increasingly prolific net musician is this: I'm happily using mp3 128bit from BladeEnc, partly because I dislike the notion that I have to shell out big bucks to Xing or somebody (no laughing in the back there! I hear Xing is actually pretty unmusical, 'flashy' sonically) just in order to produce my work- also I know mp3 is well established, and again it degrades kind of euphonically compared to some stuff I've heard.
CD audio is _already_ severely severely compromised. It is. I can't get over how people get into these arguments over what sounds better or worse and miss how degraded CD sound already is... I would say with my recent work, it is about the same degradation in quality going to 44.1/16 as it is going to 128k BladeEnc. I'm not fooling- this is due to my use of a customised 48/20 ADAT with custom coupling caps throughout the analog board, combined with the removing of all the (wave soldered!) anal hiss control caps which are only there to change the op-amp noise levels from -104db to -73252346 db for crazed silence freaks;) oh, and it feeds a custom analog board through custom cabling into the computer's A/D converters through more custom cabling. (To hear all this working, listen to songs off "anima", which uses the whole setup- expect the beginnings of a techno album soon. The album "Hard Vacuum", which is pure Noise, is actually even harder on an encoder, recorded direct to 44.1/16 and I kept the masters...)
Which is to say, I _know_ mp3 is quite flawed. I can mix and master to make this as unintrusive as possible, but it's still on a level with very good cassette tape (say, Nakamichi Dragon decks) at its best. That can be quite listenable. It can also be useful- when you start dealing with very high transparency equipment like I use, the performances have to be at a higher level, and it's easy to fake yourself out by mixing so that the slightest mistakes become obvious. If you record pretty dry it can be very unforgiving, though real punchy and involving- there's no room for error at all. I do this and then mix to 44.1/16 and then mp3 and by the time that's done, it's much harder to find flaws because the transparency just isn't there anymore:)
However, I will still be among the first to go with Nanny Ogg (gotta love the pterry references! Didn't even clue to this right away) and will even do special high-resolution mixes tailored to stress the new format to the limit- given two things.
tools that run on a PowerMac, or which can be easily built in MPW, which I'd be willing to struggle with for the cause- I'm _no_ C programmer. I'm a drummer;) (well, and bassist and guitar player etc etc etc)
somewhere to PUT the damned music. I have 177.1 megs of _compressed_ music on the Web at mp3.com, _all_ freely downloadable. That is orders of magnitude beyond what I can get for my own website, which I'm quite happy with for what it is, but it charges $1 a meg, roughly, and I'm paying $45 a month all things considered.
I like to think I am the poster child for audiophile geekness;) God knows I am ruthless enough with my equipment hacking, and I am quite capable of producing jaw-dropping sonics, and even have credentials including articles in internationally published audio journals. Maybe that makes me more prone to embrace a new format that is genuinely more capable of delivering sonics in line with what I'm after. I can only say that I'm not getting them now, am reasonably comfortable with mp3 in general terms in spite of this, am typically hostile to things like flashy Microsoft formats tailored to outmarket mp3- and from reading the views of this format's inventor (especially about 'secure' formats) I find I would really like to support Ogg- and doubt there are many other musician audiogeeks who could outdo me at producing codec-show-off materials in a musical sense. Hell, all I'd have to do is put things more up-front and finish up the multiband compression for mastering, and I could get a sound that's airy as hell and still musical. mp3 won't handle that and I know it- CD-audio barely copes with it already, mp3 would go all wavey and so I mix for soundstage. It would be _so_ _easy_ to make mixes that went a quantum leap beyond mp3. And the next album I'm doing will kind of _want_ that sound, I already know- and mp3 will be a compromise that I accept because of where I'm publishing- and I'll have all the masters handy for anytime I want to go beyond that.
I _like_ hearing about this stuff. I hope this works out. I hope this sees Slashdot again and somebody comes up with a Mac version of the programs, no matter how klugey, so I can work with the format and see what I can get out of it.
Count me in- just so happens that the contract with mp3.com is NONEXCLUSIVE rights to my recordings. If anyone sets up an Ogg Music site, I can right now throw five albums of original material on it, producing custom mixes (which I needed to do anyway for a private 'audiophile CD' project I was working on) and at least some material (Extended Play, Hard Vacuum, and anima) of very demanding audiophile quality to show off the format. All I need is the web space and the software...
(*g* dare I say it, wouldn't it be cool if I was some kinda bigshot on mp3.com by the time this happens? I'd _loooove_ to be on some sort of Successful MP3.com Musician soapbox when I start saying these things like 'use GPLed codecs' and 'no secure format bullshit' and 'there's this format called Ogg';) Therefore, I would be thrilled if people went and downloaded music from http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ which is all free as in beer and speech (meaning, if you want a sample from it I'll actually let you sample individual instruments off my master tapes with my total blessing and cooperation, instead of being a dick and forbidding it), and which is fine music and great for showing off stereos and much of it makes for a nifty Bass Test, especially "Koala" which has huge warm fretless bass and a nearly subsonic string pedal tone to freak people out with... end parenthesis)
Hey, I grew up near Newton! At least in the vicinity of Boston. Cool!
You should take road trips up to Brattleboro, Vermont, to record your segments of the show at my studio:) here's what it's been doing lately
It'd be fun- think about it. We could compose weird music and make new sound effects. Each Geeks In Spacer could deploy in a different geographical location and track down their own recording studio operator! It could be east coast versus west coast full-on geekness mp3 madness! What could be more fun?:)
Some people seem not to be understanding a certain thing: AOL is _boring_. That's the big difference.
Microsoft is _vicious_. They're like a rabid wolverine on crack with an uzi. They are a clear and present danger no matter _what_ they try to do, as it is always (1) try to kill somebody or (2) try to trap/extort somebody. They've been wildly ingenious at this and are never ever satisfied- which is shockingly unusual for super-market-leaders, as complacency is really the usual result of that position.
AOL is boring. They can be extremely callous and annoying to their customers, but that wolverine-on-crack approach just is NOT there, not remotely. Does this make them not a threat? Not exactly. They can still exert a chilling effect, but their boring 'follower' joe average culture is infinitely more likely to blandly comply with the pressures of regulation. You wouldn't see AOL forging evidence in an antitrust case. You might see them saying stupid things- that's a lot less dangerous, and my guess is that they would boringly roll any sort of regulation into their bureacracy, probably inconveniencing customers even worse- but that's really not the problem. Such oversight is not about making AOL better for its customers, it's to keep it from rolling over in its sleep and crushing anybody. Compare this with Microsoft and its uzis and enemies lists and strange throbbing pains in its corporate brain which cause it to do violent things when it observes things it doesn't like- and it's really obvious _why_ Microsoft is top priority.
The 'adult supervision' (i.e. government) will get around to AOL when it starts rolling over in its sleep too much. This is probably inevitable. However, it's going to be much more routine than the Microsoft situation, because AOL are essentially followers- they'll boringly jump through whatever hoops are called for, without whining or frothing at the mouth and biting Janet Reno, and that'll be mostly the end of it. Normal monopolies don't go for the throat like Microsoft does.
I'm happy to see Slashdot covering this and taking an interest in it. I don't see myself directly in this article, but indirectly- I have "Asperger's Syndrome" (sort of like a very articulate sort of autism), diagnosed by a helpful therapist and confirmed by Social Security making it pretty darned official;)
I know that I used to be quite depressed- and seemed even more depressed than I was, because I would completely fail to understand the concept that I should want to be alive- there's a 'self' that most people have which I continue to not be very in touch with. There are pluses and minuses to this.
Regarding medications- apparently manic depression is very much the poster child for medication. Autism is not: there isn't medications to alter that. I actually like it that way, as I acutely distrust most psychiatric medications. However, I concede that there are some conditions that really require 'psychiatric vitamins' to prevent psychiatric scurvy;P I can't help but feel personally involved, as I had always resisted psych meds politely and firmly, because I had a basic feeling that for me that wasn't where it was at. And my feeling turned out to be an insightful one.
It's important to allow people to find their own paths- some people never need to learn the slightest thing about the dark side of the mind, some learn they need chemistry adjusting to be healthy (getting stoned does _not_ count, at least it sure didn't help me any) and some learn they need to be true to themselves, even if that's kind of awkward. I have family members who may never understand me- they aren't mentally ill. Their concepts of good things to do, how I should go about my life, could get me in a heck of a lot of trouble, over my head in out-of-control situations trying madly to fake being a normal, and inevitably having a big disaster of the sort that I _used_ to think was quite inevitable. It would be the same, I think, for a bipolar person with family who kept nagging about the meds and suggesting they be discarded. The end result would be 'same old disaster', worse and worse, as the psych-luser family goes 'tsk tsk' and suggest you're not trying.
I don't have to live that way. With a bit of luck I can even manage to contribute to society. I'd ask nothing more. Some people can be motivated by greed and seek wealth and power- I am just amazed and delighted that I can survive at all, that there turned out to be a (poverty level, but stable) place for me in society at all. It didn't seem like there was, all the time I was growing up.
This _is_ the same music industry tacking on a copyright bill as a rider on some other legislation that will make their artists' music the labels' property, not for 35 years as it now is, but FOREVER.
"By treating the artist as a person hired to make the recording, the record company would own the recordings and have the right to control their distribution and use them indefinitely. For artists, this radical change would mean that they are, in fact, selling the rights to their work forever, rather than allowing a record company to use it for a limited period of time to market, distribute and earn profits from it.
Billboard reported that the change in the law was requested by the Recording Industry Association of America, a record industry group that defends the interests of the major record labels. RIAA president Hilary Rosen claimed that the amendment merely makes a recording "eligible" for work-for-hire status, and the artist and label must still sign a contract that either explicitly makes the recording a work-for-hire or leaves rights with the artist. Rosen also stated that the amendment is simply a provision that legally nails down the recording industry's view that the artist is just one of many participants, along with backup musicians, arrangers and engineers, who jointly create an album. In the RIAA's eyes, if the album is not treated as a collective work, then record labels cannot easily determine who owns the rights. Calling an album a collective work allows them to simplify the situation, they say. It would also allow them to assume ownership of the music."
Hell, they're lucky people aren't throwing bombs instead of quietly and stubbornly refusing to pay a single penny to support the corporate rape of generations of helpless artists. I am a musician and have music out there (mp3.com/ChrisJ, natch) and have CDs which can be bought. I don't pressure anybody to do this, but one day it'll be nice to sell a few of those- but I would rather NEVER sell a single CD or make a single dime off my music, if it meant I had to support a system so utterly corrupt that it beggars the imagination. Owning the artist's work outright for 35 years isn't ENOUGH? Apparently not.
I see no particularly feasible way to get around this corrupt, evil system other than mp3s. I personally am putting lots of totally legitimate mp3s out there, but I can't muster up even the smallest condemnation for the biggest most blatant copyrighted-music pirate in the world (currently, mp3.com itself;) ). If that means musicians generally are not paid, fine: that's the way it is NOW, plus you sign away your life's work to the labels- formerly for 35 years, now FOREVER. Who can justify that, or participate in it even passively? Did you know that the labels and the RIAA are changing the rules as we speak so that musicians can only sign away their own ARTWORK to their corporate masters forever? Is this retroactive, do you suppose, as it is a reclassification of existing contract terms? Is it right for musicians to lose the rights to their music forever? What are you, the music consumer, going to do about this?
I am doing this: mp3.com/ChrisJ. Whatever you do, please do _something_: at this point, not only is it the unsigned artists needing a chance, the _signed_ artists are starting to be abused worse than you would possibly imagine. Please spread the word and do something, anything, to resist. Maybe you'd prefer to ignore the indie guys and send mainstream chart-topping musicians $10 in the mail. God knows they could probably use it. It will soothe their feelings some tiny amount as they consider the way in which they have just lost ownership of their own music forever (and are likely forbidden from doing any music other than for the label in their contract).
You've got a lot of nerve talking that way about the format I USE to distribute MY ORIGINAL MUSIC. Furrfu! "I see mp3 as illegal" indeed! And so what are you doing to support the people using the format for the free distribution of their own original work? How many mp3s do you have that are 100% totally legitimate and important help to the artists who otherwise would not have the clout to get their stuff on the shelf at wal-mart?
Instead of talking nonsense like this you should start becoming part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Please go to my mp3.com site and then don't even necessarily hang around listening to my music- I mean, it's fine and people have been writing and saying they liked it but you should go ON from there, even skipping my stuff, and begin exploring and downloading some of the other artists there. There's an american Tuvan Throat-Singer (nominated for most unusual vocalist!), Steve Sklar, who plays with Big Sky. There's a rap act ("G-spot") who put together phenomenal backing tracks that groove like P-Funk. I've taught myself what Trance and Drum+Bass really are entirely from mp3.com acts and reading the message boards, it's an amazing resource. There's a huge amount of stuff out there and it's ALL legitimate uses of the format. Please stop misleading and start being part of the solution! It's really important! Thank you.
"if you had any idea how badly I wanted people to hear what I'm doing"
*ROFL!* Though I suppose inadvertently MAKING EVERY WORD A FSCKING LINK might give some idea of it... furrfu! how embarrassing! What the hell? Must be from posting 'UBB' code on the mp3.com boards and forgetting to close tags. Oh well *hehehehe* ok, so click somewhere in the general vicinity of that post... (skulks off embarrasedly:) )
Recording studios are like guitars: people will buy them and use them for the sheer joy of making music.
My recording studio cost money, and for commercial work I'll charge $75 an hour for it, which isn't even that high of a figure.
For people who are on my side in this mp3, open source, freedom to express thing, I'll literally let them use my studio FREE. If you are going to be releasing all your stuff as mp3s free (NO holdouts) and will allow purchase of your CD to be strictly voluntary (as mine are- nothing is withheld from the free downloads or will ever be), then I will be delighted to work with you for free. You merely have to call me, email me, set up a time and get yourself to Brattleboro, Vermont. (I obviously can't gallivant all around the country recording people for free!) As to other costs, hell, I can probably throw in the tape if that's a problem. (New Maxell XR-S Black only please).
As to how downloading an mp3 supports an artist? DOWNLOAD MINE and find out!! Please? Do I have to _beg_ people to listen to the artform I've been doing for almost 20 years? Do I have to tantalise people with the studio of which the 'anima' album is a good demonstration of the sounds I can get? It's not like this is crud- nearly broke top 20 in Instrumental Rock with _no_ promotion, up against much more established artists such as Carmine Appice, Dweezil Zappa, Richie Sambora and Brian May (all of whom I beat in the charts, in various combinations) and Wolf Hoffman (who I haven't beat- yet). It's not like it can be less expensive because I've been a slashdot-reading, GPL-using, linux-booting creativitysharing geek for years, and the CDs I have up there are all the minimum of 5.99 that mp3.com will allow (think about THAT for a minute. That's presumably the price at which they are still making some money- how much lower than the mainstream is that?) and there's nothing that I won't freely GIVE to someone who doesn't have the money or just wants to be given stuff.
And all I'm really asking in return is for people to DO THAT- download the mp3s, what, do I have to PAY people to listen to music that's not off the major labels? If this is not supporting the artist then WHY are 90% of the songs on the mp3.com artist boards "Please download my song, I want to be in the charts, I want to be heard"? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to be an artist supporting the mp3 revolution and feel like anybody is listening, is accepting what you're giving?? It's like that scene in Cryptonomicon- "Accept one of our free army tanks! They get 2000 mpg and go 500 miles an hour playing quadrophonic stereo with air conditioning!" and everybody wants the station wagons:P
I _beg_ people, follow those links, download my mp3s paying me nothing. If people desperately want to pay me they will eventually get their chance but for now I ask _nothing_ more. If you don't like people who rant on slashdot, go there and download somebody _else's_ music out of spite- as long as it's not "Rolling Stones Interview" or something! Do you know how irritating it is to have some rock dinosaur major label appendage open an account at mp3.com alongside you, put out some _soundcheck_ or radio station promo and then instead of using the medium (like Chuck D.!) and putting the whole album up, putting up the ONE TRACK (like Robby Krieger) and withholding the rest, or putting up INTERVIEWS (Robby, the Stones, the Eagles) so then you end up having some rock dinosaur's PRESS CONFERENCE beating you to death in the charts and staking out the top places for weeks on end? A _press_ conference? That's like listing IE service packs right alongside Freshmeat packages, complete with hit ratings. I don't know how better to express how insulting and damaging this is. "Gee, Martha, looks like many more people like and enjoy the latest NT service pack than this new linux program- looks like we should be running that!" feh.
And then I come here and read the question "And how does downloading an mp3 support an artist"? Yeesh, stand aside for venting- I apologize for freaking right out at you, because you meant no harm and surely were trying to encourage people to support artists _more_ than that. But, man! If you had any idea how badly I wanted people to just plain hear what I'm doing with this wizzy new studio I've built, how I want to be supported and respected for how seriously I'm taking the new paradigm- rather than ignored- "Oh, he has all his songs available for download, he must suck if he's not on a major label or at least trying to sell his albums by forcing people to buy them in order to get every song!" "Oh, he has all his programs open source, they must suck if they're not proprietary or at least crippleware that will shut itself off if you don't pay for it!" Can't you even see the parallels? Wouldn't you want Linux to 'be higher on the charts'? Is it so hard to understand that music operates on a similar economy of respect and status, and is equally hard to bullshit about, and is equally threatened by a totally hostile and corrupt culture that's got most people unaware there is even a better, more open, more community-oriented way?
*sigh!*
So maybe my only answer is the sheer desperation and intensity of this rant. _Please_ go to mp3.com (or some other indy-artist site if you prefer another one) and download some artist who is _not_ signed to a major label and polluting the music charts with _interviews_ and crap like that. If you do nothing else, at least take what's being given. There's damned good stuff out there. I happen to think my stuff is good stuff, but I've heard _lots_ of other acts who had terrific music up there- and I can be pretty certain that they would _all_ love to be heard, if nothing else. Half of them beg constantly in the artist bulletin boards _just_ to be downloaded, and that includes damn good artists whose music I really liked.
Please go and listen to us rather than questioning whether mp3 will help us... and listening only to major label shite! Thank you. -chris
There's a big difference between antialiasing the scene and making the result the framebuffer, and saving the scaled-up version. Basically it could be done like this:
draw frame at 2X dithercopy or otherwise antialias to a screen-size buffer display blend of buffer and the last frame's saved buffer copy current frame's buffer to last frame's buffer, repeat
This also uses less display RAM. However, it is inferior to this:
draw frame at 2X make blend of buffer and the last frame's saved buffer, also at 2X dithercopy or otherwise antialias the blend to a screen-size buffer copy screen buffer to screen, repeat
The reason the second is so much better than the first (despite using a lot more RAM) is that subtle movements are a lot more likely to show up at the scaled-up level (this does assume that there is a buffer that gets drawn to and antialiased down, which I think is a safe assumption). Storing only the screen buffer means that for many pixels there would be no change from frame to frame- storing the larger 'aliased' buffer and averaging at that size makes it far more likely that there will be significant differences. These will be averaged, and then antialiased by either dithercopying to a smaller size, or some 3dfx approach that is effectively the same thing in practice (there are only so many ways to do this). The result would be the effect I describe, of a softening of lines perpendicular to movement, but it would take on a subtlety and delicacy quite comparable to film.
Nah. If he knew this he would be doing it. I've never had much patience with the "Everybody else must know better so I just won't say anything" approach, and when I have that much to say about something it's generally because I know it. Have you written software to time-and-space antialias video footage to cut down video noise? I have. The concept is proven. What failed me was 'REALbasic', the testbed: it wouldn't handle large quicktime files at all. I can see I will have to put up demos: oh well, Y-A-thing to do. John didn't get to be "JOHN CARMACK" and inspire all this rabid loyalty by not ever learning anything from people. He's about 27 million times the coder I am, that's plain. I am simply saying that he absolutely hasn't yet clued in to what 'motion blur' needs to be as a persistent effect, and this is simply because the technology is making things possible that _nobody_ did before in gaming. I suspect that if he even reads this thread again at all, he'll be curious enough to try the idea, will observe that (sure enough) there's no obvious effect, and will begin tuning in on the details to see if there is any subtle effect like I'm describing. Q3's models and graphics are more than detailed enough to take advantage of such an effect. The result should be a greater sense of fluidity and intention in the motions onscreen, and it could even enhance the ability to read motion cues and 'intention movements' off the screen, enhancing rather than distracting from gameplay.
Sorry kid- Carmack is wrong;) (hehe- maybe I can give B1FF there a coronary!)
Or not _wrong_, exactly, he's just got slightly incorrect expectations. 3dfx is NOT helping him understand these issues, because naturally they want him to produce demos that are way over-the-top, like effects sequences in The Matrix or something.
Think of it as _time_ antialiasing. You don't antialias by having some big shocking Gaussian Blur that goes out for 10 pixels: it's very local, and the effect is to make angled edges appear more clearly angled (less stair-stepped, and not fuzzed). I do have a page that gets into this w.r.t fonts: it's this page.
By the same token, if you can see visible blurring happening in action, the motion blur is _already_ too much. What 3dfx need is not to arrange for Quake to send 27 frames to make a smooth blurry contrail behind everything (no matter how nice that may look in screenshots)- what's needed is to buffer a _single_ frame and average it with the current frame at a variable blend ratio. 50/50 might even be overly strong though it would maximize the time-based antialiasing- 40/60 could be better. Screenshots might show a tiny video echo effect on the fastest moving objects, but the most significant effect at typically high frame rates would be the softening of edges only in the specific directions of movement. To demo this you'd want something like a guy dressed in black and white pinstripes- the desired effect would be that the guy wouldn't blur out, but you would have a much clearer subliminal sense of his exact movements- something it would take a gamer or multimedia geek to pick up on.
Running at sufficiently high framerates (say, over 80), the ideal density _would_ be 50/50, because as the speed is pushed, differences between frames become smaller. The end result would be strictly confined to the softening of just such edges that are moving the most, which would highlight exactly what types of motion are happening.
Serendipitously, this type of motion blur (being not a fancy cinematic 'blur' that you don't see ALL THE TIME anyhow, but time antialiasing) would be just as suited to the driver as the planned spatial antialiasing- and just as suitable for application to ALL extant games that can be played on a 3dfx card. Again, all that's needed is to buffer one frame and average it with the current frame. It's not supposed to be a lightsaber blur, and 3dfx is foolish to emphasize this concept.
Time-based antialiasing is just as effective as spatial antialiasing but people don't know what to look for, partly because nobody seems to be bothering to even try doing it properly! It'll be just the one frame buffered- or possibly two. For the purposes of 3dfx, clearly using a single extra buffer and setting a blend ratio is the way to go. For serious video, a better approach is this: think of the frames as one pixel _deep_ and treat the antialiasing as a sphere centering on each pixel. The most weight would be on the pixel being tested, the pixels that are directly left or right or up or down or earlier or later would have less of a weighting, and so on: a pixel that's one pixel up _and_ left _and_ a frame earlier would have the least weighting. I've had very good results experimenting with code that averages the frames directly before and after a frame, then doubles the size of the immediate frame and dithercopies it down to antialias it and averages it with the time shifted frames. The goal was to cut video noise, and this approach was very effective at doing so without causing lots of stupid blur. (anyone doing an open source video editing program might try this- I need to finish up my version if possible and gpl it;) )
The long and the short of it is that 3dfx should offer this spatial antialiasing as an extra driver feature, and that Carmack shouldn't have to do anything to enable it- and the last thing you want is to dump lots of frames in for a nice pretty blur effect. As Carmack quite rightly says you can do that easily in the program anyhow and don't need special interaction with the card- the only thing he's not getting (and this is because 3dfx are pointedly not suggesting he try it) is that time based antialiasing really isn't his problem, and is an entirely undramatic effect, to be sensed rather than seen and marvelled at. And marvelling at effects might sell more 3D cards;)
Again, the desired effects are practical rather than strictly visual in a 3D game. Racing and flying games would definitely be more exciting with such a driver feature, but in a 3D game it would be a matter of quickly sensing when a player you're chasing is turning or slowing- or whether you are dodging a flying projectile thoroughly enough. These things would be conveyed through the subtle softening of the lines perpendicular to motion- giving you more information than just the straight frames. (I really need to render up some demos of this...)
You're assuming with very little justification that Microsoft's business is solid, and that their books are honest, not to mention that their basic business plan is viable.
Microsoft's business is in a severe drought- the biggest product is only W2K, and there's a howling void of other product ready to do major tonnage. Furthermore, W2K is evoking a very wait-and-see attitude from many unlikely sources, even the Gartner Group.
Based on Microsoft's approach to truth and veracity in fscking COURT, what gives anyone the idea that they are being truthful in their accounting?
Their business plan is _only_ viable as long as they can continue growing by 30% a quarter. That's a fscking insanely cancerous rate- and they ARE ALREADY FAILING to maintain it, and W2K doesn't look like it wil help. People say "The stock will always be a good buy because it will always grow at X% per quarter!" Reality check- what percentages do they have in their markets? 90%, 95%, 97%? Where is the room to grow there? They've hit the ceiling.
I saw one guy, an analyst, talk sense about all this. His words? "Get out." In fact he said 'you should have gotten out _before_ Monday'. I find that hard to argue with. _Nothing_ lasts forever. This touching belief in Microsoft is cargo-cult thinking.
Actually, the poster child for (good) motion blur isn't FPSes at all. It's racing games and flightsims. Having the nearfield flickering semirandomly loses the sense of great speed. Even a small amount of general purpose motion blur would help this quite a bit. I concede that's Not Your Problem:)
The QTVR panorama of my studio has gotten six downloads/views, but the mp3 tune "Dog" (again, at http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ is at 34 on those charts now with a double bullet beside it indicating 'on fire!':):):)
Of course, the panorama is only a picture of my studio and "Dog" is a good song (sort of an instrumental groove jam with a happy upbeat feel, tight and gutsy) but that still fits in very nicely with my sense of what these divergent formats are for. I would be dismayed if the Quicktime media was getting all the downloads, as again it's closed and I don't like encouraging that.
Speaking of encouraging, I've been feeding my karma account (no not Slashdot karma, general karma) by making samples to share with other artists at mp3.com, sort of in a musician-style open source spirit. If any slashdotters want them, a highlight is the drum samples I made, those are at http://www.airwindows.com/studio/DrumSounds.zip and could come in handy. Hope people enjoy them, they're darn good samples:)
MS does not maintain any support burden. They have never been the ones keeping it all running. If they were zapped off the face of the earth, all that would happen is that the MCSEs would _not_ have their licenses 'expired' arbitrarily, and the users of Office and Excel etc etc would have (much) longer before all the file formats change again making everything earlier no longer work.
Really. From a purely IT perspective, if you obliterated Microsoft it would only help. Everything being done to support Microsoft products in the marketplace is being done by third parties anyhow.
Very shrewd! Very shrewd indeed. I buy Cringely's take on this completely- I just draw the line at his conclusions.
Yes, the judge doesn't understand that Microsoft is criminal to the core. Yes, the judge is continually trying to look for a change of heart, a sign somebody there has a clue. Yes, MS is taking all of this as signs of weakness in a purely darwinian armwrestling match. But there's still the law, and there's still the judge- and Microsoft doesn't make all the rules. Who noticed all the details on the failure of settlement? Posner pointedly avoids laying blame for the failure on Microsoft- yet the last straw was when he read Microsoft's latest proposed terms. _I_ think Posner is going back to Jackson and saying "I give up. These guys are the biggest criminals I've ever seen! They're not even ashamed of it! Everything they've proposed has intentionally had loopholes you could drive a truck through, they don't even bother concealing it. They have no good faith at all, it's absolutely sick to watch. Nail 'em. Nobody can say we didn't try, and they can't even say I was prejudiced- I thanked them and implied it was the states' fault. Excuse me while I go _wash_ _my_ _hands_... euggggh!"
I'm serious- I think these judges have been beating their heads against Microsoft's obvious, relentless criminality, astonished that it doesn't even understand what they're trying to do. And I agree with Cringely that MS can see this only as a sign of weakness, because they are so far outside the law in their heads that they can't even comprehend it (something which shocks the hell out of the judges). But Cringely is wrong if he thinks that is going to help them- MS is NOT the law, and to the legal system, it is not a defense to say "I am innocent because all this legal stuff is crap anyway! I kick ass wherever I want and you can't stop me 'cause you're weak and cowardly!". That is... not an effective position to take.
It is the position Microsoft believes, in its heart. And so, I see Posner giving up, going irreconcilably against Microsoft (Posner's first love is the law, not power) and cleverly issuing statements to block even the implication that he was biased and quit due to unfair prejudice against Microsoft. His statement seeming to blame the states... is for the appeals courts to appreciate, not us.
On the one hand, I have a Quicktime file on my website. It's a QTVR view of my studio- which has a page here. The QTVR is neat and was a pain to make but I made it using only free tools and Photoshop, not the insanely-expensive-but-more-convenient Quicktime authoring studio Apple sells.
However, I have the file relegated to a text link, because I'm not about to go embedding it in my page- I don't consider it right to imply that Quicktime is part of the normal web browsing experience, any more than WMP should be. So my 'extended media' sits under a text link like the sideshow it basically is.
For my music I go with mp3, with a vengeance. (and actually it's doing real well- I've been doing some instrumental pieces, and my bouncy rocking instrumental "Dog" is beating Carmine Appice w. Richie Sambora, and another track of Carmine Appice with Brian May, in the charts! www.mp3.com/ChrisJ) So I'm really pushing mp3 hard- and mpeg in general, in fact I had some video clips on my site and pulled the Sorenson Quicktimes leaving only the abbreviated, hacked ASTARTE-demo mpegs up even though they could only run a few seconds.
Speaking of which- thank you Millenium *rejoice rejoice* for tipping me off to Movie2MPEG! Made my day- I really _needed_ that! I'm going to see if I can re-do some of my video stuff using this.
So basically, my position is this: I like Quicktime, I use it for authoring, but I'm very reluctant to publish in it. Why? Not quality, it's better than MPEG and does amazing things many of which I understand and can use. It's that it's not open- and I just can't support that in a format. It's as bad as using Word format....
Slashdot Mirror
It's like this. The idea of easy mode is that you can't stall or black out or red out, but also you don't have quite the turning ability of full realism. It would appear at first glance that this gives a big advantage to 'real pilots' flying full realism. But! A game like Warbirds is _very_ intensely modelled. Blackouts, redouts, stalls are significant challenges, quite demanding to cope with in heavy combat- you have to maintain 'situational awareness' of not only the enemies but also the state of your own aircraft or you _will_ blow your energy and end up unable to maneuver, or even crash.
To add to that, there are whole maneuvers entirely based on making the other person lose their SA, for instance doing a climbing spiral away from a Focke-Wulf (which has very nasty and violent departure characteristics). If you can get the FW hungry enough to get a shot at you, and you're maintaining the climbing spiral, you can get him to try to pull up, and snap into a really _nasty_ spin and fall, whereupon you swoop down and pounce...
I was never that great at gunnery but I'm a natural stickjock :) my love is the barnstorming, flinging a plane around madly and doing the unexpected. When I flew Air Warrior I had about a 50% chance of evading _anybody_ if I was freaked out enough, because I'd fly totally nuts and force them to black out trying to keep up with me! The whole mad-inverted-immel-to-ten-inches-off-the-ground routine. I'd also teach people how to fly and maneuver ("OK, we are at 10,000 feet. It will take you 20 seconds even to _reach_ the ground. Now turn real tight and keep the nose _way_ below the horizon, and this time you won't stall!" ;) )
There was this one time that I, in my dweebfire^Hspit, went after this cargo plane in Warbirds, figuring it was going to be a piece of cake. Well- wow! It noticed me and began flipping around like mad, sudden fierce maneuvers that I couldn't believe the guy didn't black out, it was all over the place and I, in my overpowered Spitfire, was clinging to the air by sheer force of will, wrestling the beast around about ten feet off the ground and staying on the guy for maybe ten minutes, pinging him repeatedly, basically putting in an amazing performance of virtuoso planehandling- and when he vanished over a hill and I lost him, I had to say over the radio, "Whoever was flying that Junkers- wow, man, good show!"
Cheating comes in many forms, but the point is, it kills the fun of the game. You want to be playing in the same universe as your opponents. It's just as spirit-breaking if you were in EverCr^Hquest and went up against some guy who spent $10,000 on having a character that could stomp anybody- and goes around doing so. Or against some group staking out an item so they can sell it on eBay. *shrug* these things need to be dealt with one way or another...
I do agree that the majority of groups, bands, or backyard movie productions _will_ fail from lack of discipline. But there are a _lot_ of groups, bands, and there will be a lot of backyard movie productions. As these things become attainable certain artists/groups will develop cult followings- those are the ones to watch. You just need to learn where to look to spot them, as they will not have the promotion muscle of a stultified industry looking for one big hit to do tonnage on. I'm saying that situation is artificial and doesn't meet consumer's needs very well- it's natural to differentiate more than that. There will probably always be a market for blockbusters as well- even if it mutates into a 'pay 100$ (or 1000$?) to don black tie and go to see a movie' in special luxury theaters.
How much does it change your perspective _knowing_ that there are artists in any given field who will eat dirt and ramen noodles for years, decades, if doing so lets them create _their_ artwork? The complexity limitation does not need to be overcome because people have _always_ been prone to go to extremes in their hobbies and arts. A madly romantic, obsessed hobbyist is better than the most highly paid hack. The complexities professionals deal with are far beyond the laymen, but there are always madmen out there so beyond the professionals that it'd give you whiplash just thinking about it- this is the apex of art and craft, where they merge. For once I don't even have to use myself as an example- compare Linux kernel hackers to, say, VBA programmers for fortune 500 companies, or whoever implemented Clippy or Microsoft Bob. Put not your trust in 'professionals' ;) at least, not to the extent that they are your yardstick. This is what concerns me about your argument- you continue to make a case for the big industries of the last century. Even in their heyday, these came down to individual artistic visions. Hitchcock. Lucas. David O. Selznick...
And David O. Selznick is _dead_. The starmaking apparatus he exemplified and personified needs to die now too. It's doing nothing but Pokemon and Ricky Martin, Hootie and maybe a bit of Hanson just for giggles. That's where the safe money is, and it's a crime against art to reduce it to strictly "is this the biggest monetary reward at the end?".
Naturally there will be exceptions, but I am far from convinced there is _any_ justification for assuming the necessity for huge sums of money, the 'blockbuster' movie or 'top 40' song. Who _needs_ to see a blockbuster movie or hear a top 40 song? Who would really be harmed if these things vanished and media became much more localised and focussed in on particular areas of interest? Is there even a need for a full-length movie? If the answer is 'yes, the length is important' then why not a 27 hour movie? The forms media has fallen into are impossibly stereotyped and restrictive. They will crack... and shatter...
Only a bit- disk space issues. I have only two 2.1g IBM SCSI hard drives, each of which is partitioned in thirds. I've managed to fit a Linux install into one of the thirds. I wasn't aware I could even _get_ a BeOS for PowerMac anymore, short of going out and buying it. To make matters worse I'm running a G3 upgrade on it :)
To some extent you're pre-supposing a scarcity of resources. One of the major points in the explosion of technology is that this scarcity isn't continuing. I can tell you that for less total money than some of you put into your PCs, I as a musician and sound engineer (www.mp3.com/ChrisJ for obligatory examples :) ) am able to produce completed work that, technically, kills a lot of stuff released by the mainstream industry throughout history, and on top of that I have access to types of tools that the engineers of the 50s and 60s and 70s would have killed for.
On top of this I have access to global distribution simply due to my using the mp3 format, which is popular and downloadable, so not even _distribution_ is an insuperable problem.
If I have access to all this for so little money, a level of production and distribution that _used_ to require not only million dollar recording studios and mastering houses but also fleets of trucks and distributors, doesn't that say something about how the rules are changing?
And if I can (through a lot of years of study and work and a certain amount of saving and buying and a lot of mad hacking of equipment) do this NOW, what does that suggest about the future prospects of indie film directors and actors and cinematographers as the technology advances to the point where essentially anything imaginable becomes 'filmable', not for billions of dollars but out of the home?
I would humbly argue that 'consumer-grade' camcorders will eventually beat Cinemascope given enough years- and I will stubbornly argue that, given a world full of people to draw on, there is going to be a _lot_ of stuff out there more interesting than backyards and dogs. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that only through media cartels can real Art be created- and... *g* well, maybe that _is_ what some people are suggesting, but my God, such a thought!
The big error, the big oversight here is the unspoken assumption that "because you make something, you can find a market for it". That's, unfortunately, bullshit... certainly both in computer software and in music, the market is distorted by bigger players who control access to distribution and promotion. This is so obvious that people don't see it, it's taken for granted that a cartel totally dictates what you can market in these industries. Yet, it presents a nasty barrier for entry, and blocks the use of capitalism by individuals.
I do music because I like to- I like making it, I can usually pick out something of mine that about anybody would like (it varies a great deal- which is a negative, if you're a cartel: I'm not supposed to be a working artist, I'm supposed to be an easily categorisable disposable artist to be squeezed dry in a single burst of major exposure, then ditched). The thing to remember about my music freeness, determination to make _everything_ downloadable without penalty and withhold nothing, determination to cooperate with anybody who wants to use sampling and take bits of my music for their own use without compensation- is that, just maybe, I have a clearer idea of the real issues here than a lot of people who still believe there's a free market for music (or software).
As I see it- promotion is _everything_. Being known, being publically recognized, is infinitely more valuable than trying to coerce a return on particular artworks or programs- because it is the only thing that can stand against the forces of a cartel controlling the relevant industry. If you are going all business, make a little record label and hammer out good relationships with some stores and pressing houses and a studio and mastering house- guess what? You can't force the cartels to give you distribution. You are _completely_ outmatched there. It is _impossible_ to pursue a 'push' model of product distribution in the face of industry cartels- and if that's where you've put your energies, you're doomed.
If you go all 'free' you're pursuing a 'pull' model. How many really gifted Linux programmers are starving right now? By the same token I see 'free music' as the _only_ reasonable choice (even to the extent that I'll happily talk about all that and tip other people off to it- and I'm told by other people doing this that it actually works!). Instead of 'give, and depend on the gratitude of fans' being a dumb idealistic approach, it is actually the only bulletproof approach- because it is a 'pull' model. You _can't_ force people to listen to and buy your music when you're up against cartels- but no matter how outmatched you are, you can _give_ it away and if people are so happy that they want to help you, nothing can stop them! (speaking of which, did you go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and download a bunch of free music yet? ;) )
I'm totally, dead serious. In some ways I'm claiming a pretty serious breakdown of capitalism, that it's not possible for an individual to push their product onto the market in the usual business sense. I _am_ claiming that. But I'm also advocating the solution, which is that in an era of such great connectivity, exposure and ability to get attention are far more valuable than the ability to get your stuff _shoved_ on people- when your horizon is as large as the world, suddenly _everyone_ is 'shoving' their crap onto you, and it all blurs and becomes totally valueless and meaningless. Truth becomes incomprehensible when people will say anything to con you ('innovation'), and in that condition the ability of some small capitalist to get their _demand_ through becomes nil. You can't out-hard-sell a planet full of cartels.
But! As Linux has shown, with this global horizon, there's the capacity for little pockets of generosity and no-strings-attached sincere stuff to get attention, even in the face of the constant deafening roar of the cartels and media. Somebody says, "Hey- didja know you can download all the source for linux and hack with it and you're _allowed_ to?". In the same spirit I say, "Didja know you can download _all_ of my songs on all my (buyable) CDs totally free and not only are you allowed to, I'm kind of passionate that you should never _have_ to cough up money for 'em?" It's partly the simple idealism of "Screw this hucksterism, I want to give stuff", but in some cases (certainly mine) there's also "Things have gone so far out of balance that now, not only do I _want_ to give stuff, but it's the only possible way to earn supporters".
And so, off I go- not only producing good music and stubbornly making it freely available, but also publically offering access to the master tapes for anyone who wants samples, and in fact on Slashdot I've repeatedly offered to let opensource programmer types record music in my studio (you get here, I can't do roadtrips) for FREE when I could legitimately charge $75 an hour, easy. I still offer that- anybody wanting should talk to me. I'm also offering free access to the Geeks In Space people. It's hard to know what more I could offer, but if I think of anything I shall offer that as well :) because (a) I get a kick out of it and like being that way, and (b) again, I see a benefit in it for me, a _social_ benefit not a coercing one. The more I can give the more valuable I become and the more likely it is that I'll keep busy, start doing more work with others, to the point where eventually I can ask $75 an hour sound engineering and it'll seem like an incredible bargain- or have 1% of music listeners buy my ($5.99) CD and have that amount to a cozy nest-egg.
But the important thing is that that doesn't come first. It can _only_ happen if I give so well that it's appreciated, if I work hard enough to be able to really offer something.
So final anti-hype- if anyone could go to www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and www.mp3.com/RFW and give suggestions on what _more_ I can do to give something valuable to people for nothing, I'd be real pleased :) I'm starting work on a techno album which will be pretty unusual, and need to fit in some equipment building in the form of a fancy EQ for my drum sounds. More albums? Better terms for offering studio time? Do people want schematics for the equipment I'm building, or the modifications I make to the gear I have? As might be imagined I'm holding nothing back whatsoever- and like it that way. So, anything else people want?
Oh phoo, just give me Ogg ;)
Then, reading the inventor's interview, I was blown away by how good his attitude was. He GPLs: I GPL. He _specifically_ and eloquently objects to the notion of 'security features'. He's clearly coming from an audiophile sort of place- I'd given up hope of finding that in compressed digital music at _all_- I currently like mp3s because they distort pretty smoothly and unaggressively, the attempt to deliver 'bright clear spectacular highs' will inevitably produce horrid distortions and breakup, just as it does in hardware and analog audio, only much worse. Now here's somebody with an actual clue concerning himself with issues that mean a great deal to me! Wow. I kinda like that.
My take on the matter as an active and increasingly prolific net musician is this: I'm happily using mp3 128bit from BladeEnc, partly because I dislike the notion that I have to shell out big bucks to Xing or somebody (no laughing in the back there! I hear Xing is actually pretty unmusical, 'flashy' sonically) just in order to produce my work- also I know mp3 is well established, and again it degrades kind of euphonically compared to some stuff I've heard.
CD audio is _already_ severely severely compromised. It is. I can't get over how people get into these arguments over what sounds better or worse and miss how degraded CD sound already is... I would say with my recent work, it is about the same degradation in quality going to 44.1/16 as it is going to 128k BladeEnc. I'm not fooling- this is due to my use of a customised 48/20 ADAT with custom coupling caps throughout the analog board, combined with the removing of all the (wave soldered!) anal hiss control caps which are only there to change the op-amp noise levels from -104db to -73252346 db for crazed silence freaks ;) oh, and it feeds a custom analog board through custom cabling into the computer's A/D converters through more custom cabling. (To hear all this working, listen to songs off "anima", which uses the whole setup- expect the beginnings of a techno album soon. The album "Hard Vacuum", which is pure Noise, is actually even harder on an encoder, recorded direct to 44.1/16 and I kept the masters...)
Which is to say, I _know_ mp3 is quite flawed. I can mix and master to make this as unintrusive as possible, but it's still on a level with very good cassette tape (say, Nakamichi Dragon decks) at its best. That can be quite listenable. It can also be useful- when you start dealing with very high transparency equipment like I use, the performances have to be at a higher level, and it's easy to fake yourself out by mixing so that the slightest mistakes become obvious. If you record pretty dry it can be very unforgiving, though real punchy and involving- there's no room for error at all. I do this and then mix to 44.1/16 and then mp3 and by the time that's done, it's much harder to find flaws because the transparency just isn't there anymore :)
However, I will still be among the first to go with Nanny Ogg (gotta love the pterry references! Didn't even clue to this right away) and will even do special high-resolution mixes tailored to stress the new format to the limit- given two things.
- tools that run on a PowerMac, or which can be easily built in MPW, which I'd be willing to struggle with for the cause- I'm _no_ C programmer. I'm a drummer
;) (well, and bassist and guitar player etc etc etc) - somewhere to PUT the damned music. I have 177.1 megs of _compressed_ music on the Web at mp3.com, _all_ freely downloadable. That is orders of magnitude beyond what I can get for my own website, which I'm quite happy with for what it is, but it charges $1 a meg, roughly, and I'm paying $45 a month all things considered.
I like to think I am the poster child for audiophile geeknessI _like_ hearing about this stuff. I hope this works out. I hope this sees Slashdot again and somebody comes up with a Mac version of the programs, no matter how klugey, so I can work with the format and see what I can get out of it.
Count me in- just so happens that the contract with mp3.com is NONEXCLUSIVE rights to my recordings. If anyone sets up an Ogg Music site, I can right now throw five albums of original material on it, producing custom mixes (which I needed to do anyway for a private 'audiophile CD' project I was working on) and at least some material (Extended Play, Hard Vacuum, and anima) of very demanding audiophile quality to show off the format. All I need is the web space and the software...
(*g* dare I say it, wouldn't it be cool if I was some kinda bigshot on mp3.com by the time this happens? I'd _loooove_ to be on some sort of Successful MP3.com Musician soapbox when I start saying these things like 'use GPLed codecs' and 'no secure format bullshit' and 'there's this format called Ogg' ;) Therefore, I would be thrilled if people went and downloaded music from http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ which is all free as in beer and speech (meaning, if you want a sample from it I'll actually let you sample individual instruments off my master tapes with my total blessing and cooperation, instead of being a dick and forbidding it), and which is fine music and great for showing off stereos and much of it makes for a nifty Bass Test, especially "Koala" which has huge warm fretless bass and a nearly subsonic string pedal tone to freak people out with... end parenthesis)
You should take road trips up to Brattleboro, Vermont, to record your segments of the show at my studio :) here's what it's been doing lately
It'd be fun- think about it. We could compose weird music and make new sound effects. Each Geeks In Spacer could deploy in a different geographical location and track down their own recording studio operator! It could be east coast versus west coast full-on geekness mp3 madness! What could be more fun? :)
*heh* no, then all that would happen is time would loop, Janeway would die and everything would start over ;)
Microsoft is _vicious_. They're like a rabid wolverine on crack with an uzi. They are a clear and present danger no matter _what_ they try to do, as it is always (1) try to kill somebody or (2) try to trap/extort somebody. They've been wildly ingenious at this and are never ever satisfied- which is shockingly unusual for super-market-leaders, as complacency is really the usual result of that position.
AOL is boring. They can be extremely callous and annoying to their customers, but that wolverine-on-crack approach just is NOT there, not remotely. Does this make them not a threat? Not exactly. They can still exert a chilling effect, but their boring 'follower' joe average culture is infinitely more likely to blandly comply with the pressures of regulation. You wouldn't see AOL forging evidence in an antitrust case. You might see them saying stupid things- that's a lot less dangerous, and my guess is that they would boringly roll any sort of regulation into their bureacracy, probably inconveniencing customers even worse- but that's really not the problem. Such oversight is not about making AOL better for its customers, it's to keep it from rolling over in its sleep and crushing anybody. Compare this with Microsoft and its uzis and enemies lists and strange throbbing pains in its corporate brain which cause it to do violent things when it observes things it doesn't like- and it's really obvious _why_ Microsoft is top priority.
The 'adult supervision' (i.e. government) will get around to AOL when it starts rolling over in its sleep too much. This is probably inevitable. However, it's going to be much more routine than the Microsoft situation, because AOL are essentially followers- they'll boringly jump through whatever hoops are called for, without whining or frothing at the mouth and biting Janet Reno, and that'll be mostly the end of it. Normal monopolies don't go for the throat like Microsoft does.
I know that I used to be quite depressed- and seemed even more depressed than I was, because I would completely fail to understand the concept that I should want to be alive- there's a 'self' that most people have which I continue to not be very in touch with. There are pluses and minuses to this.
Regarding medications- apparently manic depression is very much the poster child for medication. Autism is not: there isn't medications to alter that. I actually like it that way, as I acutely distrust most psychiatric medications. However, I concede that there are some conditions that really require 'psychiatric vitamins' to prevent psychiatric scurvy ;P I can't help but feel personally involved, as I had always resisted psych meds politely and firmly, because I had a basic feeling that for me that wasn't where it was at. And my feeling turned out to be an insightful one.
It's important to allow people to find their own paths- some people never need to learn the slightest thing about the dark side of the mind, some learn they need chemistry adjusting to be healthy (getting stoned does _not_ count, at least it sure didn't help me any) and some learn they need to be true to themselves, even if that's kind of awkward. I have family members who may never understand me- they aren't mentally ill. Their concepts of good things to do, how I should go about my life, could get me in a heck of a lot of trouble, over my head in out-of-control situations trying madly to fake being a normal, and inevitably having a big disaster of the sort that I _used_ to think was quite inevitable. It would be the same, I think, for a bipolar person with family who kept nagging about the meds and suggesting they be discarded. The end result would be 'same old disaster', worse and worse, as the psych-luser family goes 'tsk tsk' and suggest you're not trying.
I don't have to live that way. With a bit of luck I can even manage to contribute to society. I'd ask nothing more. Some people can be motivated by greed and seek wealth and power- I am just amazed and delighted that I can survive at all, that there turned out to be a (poverty level, but stable) place for me in society at all. It didn't seem like there was, all the time I was growing up.
http://www.livedaily.com/archive/2000/2k01/wk3/Ame ndmentToCopyrightActCo.html
Hell, they're lucky people aren't throwing bombs instead of quietly and stubbornly refusing to pay a single penny to support the corporate rape of generations of helpless artists. I am a musician and have music out there (mp3.com/ChrisJ, natch) and have CDs which can be bought. I don't pressure anybody to do this, but one day it'll be nice to sell a few of those- but I would rather NEVER sell a single CD or make a single dime off my music, if it meant I had to support a system so utterly corrupt that it beggars the imagination. Owning the artist's work outright for 35 years isn't ENOUGH? Apparently not.I see no particularly feasible way to get around this corrupt, evil system other than mp3s. I personally am putting lots of totally legitimate mp3s out there, but I can't muster up even the smallest condemnation for the biggest most blatant copyrighted-music pirate in the world (currently, mp3.com itself ;) ). If that means musicians generally are not paid, fine: that's the way it is NOW, plus you sign away your life's work to the labels- formerly for 35 years, now FOREVER. Who can justify that, or participate in it even passively? Did you know that the labels and the RIAA are changing the rules as we speak so that musicians can only sign away their own ARTWORK to their corporate masters forever? Is this retroactive, do you suppose, as it is a reclassification of existing contract terms? Is it right for musicians to lose the rights to their music forever? What are you, the music consumer, going to do about this?
I am doing this: mp3.com/ChrisJ. Whatever you do, please do _something_: at this point, not only is it the unsigned artists needing a chance, the _signed_ artists are starting to be abused worse than you would possibly imagine. Please spread the word and do something, anything, to resist. Maybe you'd prefer to ignore the indie guys and send mainstream chart-topping musicians $10 in the mail. God knows they could probably use it. It will soothe their feelings some tiny amount as they consider the way in which they have just lost ownership of their own music forever (and are likely forbidden from doing any music other than for the label in their contract).
Instead of talking nonsense like this you should start becoming part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Please go to my mp3.com site and then don't even necessarily hang around listening to my music- I mean, it's fine and people have been writing and saying they liked it but you should go ON from there, even skipping my stuff, and begin exploring and downloading some of the other artists there. There's an american Tuvan Throat-Singer (nominated for most unusual vocalist!), Steve Sklar, who plays with Big Sky. There's a rap act ("G-spot") who put together phenomenal backing tracks that groove like P-Funk. I've taught myself what Trance and Drum+Bass really are entirely from mp3.com acts and reading the message boards, it's an amazing resource. There's a huge amount of stuff out there and it's ALL legitimate uses of the format. Please stop misleading and start being part of the solution! It's really important! Thank you.
*ROFL!* Though I suppose inadvertently MAKING EVERY WORD A FSCKING LINK might give some idea of it... furrfu! how embarrassing! What the hell? Must be from posting 'UBB' code on the mp3.com boards and forgetting to close tags. Oh well *hehehehe* ok, so click somewhere in the general vicinity of that post... (skulks off embarrasedly :) )
My recording studio cost money, and for commercial work I'll charge $75 an hour for it, which isn't even that high of a figure.
For people who are on my side in this mp3, open source, freedom to express thing, I'll literally let them use my studio FREE. If you are going to be releasing all your stuff as mp3s free (NO holdouts) and will allow purchase of your CD to be strictly voluntary (as mine are- nothing is withheld from the free downloads or will ever be), then I will be delighted to work with you for free. You merely have to call me, email me, set up a time and get yourself to Brattleboro, Vermont. (I obviously can't gallivant all around the country recording people for free!) As to other costs, hell, I can probably throw in the tape if that's a problem. (New Maxell XR-S Black only please).
As to how downloading an mp3 supports an artist? DOWNLOAD MINE and find out!! Please? Do I have to _beg_ people to listen to the artform I've been doing for almost 20 years? Do I have to tantalise people with the studio of which the 'anima' album is a good demonstration of the sounds I can get? It's not like this is crud- nearly broke top 20 in Instrumental Rock with _no_ promotion, up against much more established artists such as Carmine Appice, Dweezil Zappa, Richie Sambora and Brian May (all of whom I beat in the charts, in various combinations) and Wolf Hoffman (who I haven't beat- yet). It's not like it can be less expensive because I've been a slashdot-reading, GPL-using, linux-booting creativitysharing geek for years, and the CDs I have up there are all the minimum of 5.99 that mp3.com will allow (think about THAT for a minute. That's presumably the price at which they are still making some money- how much lower than the mainstream is that?) and there's nothing that I won't freely GIVE to someone who doesn't have the money or just wants to be given stuff.
And all I'm really asking in return is for people to DO THAT- download the mp3s, what, do I have to PAY people to listen to music that's not off the major labels? If this is not supporting the artist then WHY are 90% of the songs on the mp3.com artist boards "Please download my song, I want to be in the charts, I want to be heard"? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to be an artist supporting the mp3 revolution and feel like anybody is listening, is accepting what you're giving?? It's like that scene in Cryptonomicon- "Accept one of our free army tanks! They get 2000 mpg and go 500 miles an hour playing quadrophonic stereo with air conditioning!" and everybody wants the station wagons :P
I _beg_ people, follow those links, download my mp3s paying me nothing. If people desperately want to pay me they will eventually get their chance but for now I ask _nothing_ more. If you don't like people who rant on slashdot, go there and download somebody _else's_ music out of spite- as long as it's not "Rolling Stones Interview" or something! Do you know how irritating it is to have some rock dinosaur major label appendage open an account at mp3.com alongside you, put out some _soundcheck_ or radio station promo and then instead of using the medium (like Chuck D.!) and putting the whole album up, putting up the ONE TRACK (like Robby Krieger) and withholding the rest, or putting up INTERVIEWS (Robby, the Stones, the Eagles) so then you end up having some rock dinosaur's PRESS CONFERENCE beating you to death in the charts and staking out the top places for weeks on end? A _press_ conference? That's like listing IE service packs right alongside Freshmeat packages, complete with hit ratings. I don't know how better to express how insulting and damaging this is. "Gee, Martha, looks like many more people like and enjoy the latest NT service pack than this new linux program- looks like we should be running that!" feh.
And then I come here and read the question "And how does downloading an mp3 support an artist"? Yeesh, stand aside for venting- I apologize for freaking right out at you, because you meant no harm and surely were trying to encourage people to support artists _more_ than that. But, man! If you had any idea how badly I wanted people to just plain hear what I'm doing with this wizzy new studio I've built, how I want to be supported and respected for how seriously I'm taking the new paradigm- rather than ignored- "Oh, he has all his songs available for download, he must suck if he's not on a major label or at least trying to sell his albums by forcing people to buy them in order to get every song!" "Oh, he has all his programs open source, they must suck if they're not proprietary or at least crippleware that will shut itself off if you don't pay for it!" Can't you even see the parallels? Wouldn't you want Linux to 'be higher on the charts'? Is it so hard to understand that music operates on a similar economy of respect and status, and is equally hard to bullshit about, and is equally threatened by a totally hostile and corrupt culture that's got most people unaware there is even a better, more open, more community-oriented way?
*sigh!*
So maybe my only answer is the sheer desperation and intensity of this rant. _Please_ go to mp3.com (or some other indy-artist site if you prefer another one) and download some artist who is _not_ signed to a major label and polluting the music charts with _interviews_ and crap like that. If you do nothing else, at least take what's being given. There's damned good stuff out there. I happen to think my stuff is good stuff, but I've heard _lots_ of other acts who had terrific music up there- and I can be pretty certain that they would _all_ love to be heard, if nothing else. Half of them beg constantly in the artist bulletin boards _just_ to be downloaded, and that includes damn good artists whose music I really liked.
Please go and listen to us rather than questioning whether mp3 will help us... and listening only to major label shite! Thank you. -chris
draw frame at 2X
dithercopy or otherwise antialias to a screen-size buffer
display blend of buffer and the last frame's saved buffer
copy current frame's buffer to last frame's buffer, repeat
This also uses less display RAM. However, it is inferior to this:
draw frame at 2X
make blend of buffer and the last frame's saved buffer, also at 2X
dithercopy or otherwise antialias the blend to a screen-size buffer
copy screen buffer to screen, repeat
The reason the second is so much better than the first (despite using a lot more RAM) is that subtle movements are a lot more likely to show up at the scaled-up level (this does assume that there is a buffer that gets drawn to and antialiased down, which I think is a safe assumption). Storing only the screen buffer means that for many pixels there would be no change from frame to frame- storing the larger 'aliased' buffer and averaging at that size makes it far more likely that there will be significant differences. These will be averaged, and then antialiased by either dithercopying to a smaller size, or some 3dfx approach that is effectively the same thing in practice (there are only so many ways to do this). The result would be the effect I describe, of a softening of lines perpendicular to movement, but it would take on a subtlety and delicacy quite comparable to film.
Which is of course what 3dfx really want...
Nah. If he knew this he would be doing it. I've never had much patience with the "Everybody else must know better so I just won't say anything" approach, and when I have that much to say about something it's generally because I know it. Have you written software to time-and-space antialias video footage to cut down video noise? I have. The concept is proven. What failed me was 'REALbasic', the testbed: it wouldn't handle large quicktime files at all. I can see I will have to put up demos: oh well, Y-A-thing to do. John didn't get to be "JOHN CARMACK" and inspire all this rabid loyalty by not ever learning anything from people. He's about 27 million times the coder I am, that's plain. I am simply saying that he absolutely hasn't yet clued in to what 'motion blur' needs to be as a persistent effect, and this is simply because the technology is making things possible that _nobody_ did before in gaming. I suspect that if he even reads this thread again at all, he'll be curious enough to try the idea, will observe that (sure enough) there's no obvious effect, and will begin tuning in on the details to see if there is any subtle effect like I'm describing. Q3's models and graphics are more than detailed enough to take advantage of such an effect. The result should be a greater sense of fluidity and intention in the motions onscreen, and it could even enhance the ability to read motion cues and 'intention movements' off the screen, enhancing rather than distracting from gameplay.
Or not _wrong_, exactly, he's just got slightly incorrect expectations. 3dfx is NOT helping him understand these issues, because naturally they want him to produce demos that are way over-the-top, like effects sequences in The Matrix or something.
Think of it as _time_ antialiasing. You don't antialias by having some big shocking Gaussian Blur that goes out for 10 pixels: it's very local, and the effect is to make angled edges appear more clearly angled (less stair-stepped, and not fuzzed). I do have a page that gets into this w.r.t fonts: it's this page.
By the same token, if you can see visible blurring happening in action, the motion blur is _already_ too much. What 3dfx need is not to arrange for Quake to send 27 frames to make a smooth blurry contrail behind everything (no matter how nice that may look in screenshots)- what's needed is to buffer a _single_ frame and average it with the current frame at a variable blend ratio. 50/50 might even be overly strong though it would maximize the time-based antialiasing- 40/60 could be better. Screenshots might show a tiny video echo effect on the fastest moving objects, but the most significant effect at typically high frame rates would be the softening of edges only in the specific directions of movement. To demo this you'd want something like a guy dressed in black and white pinstripes- the desired effect would be that the guy wouldn't blur out, but you would have a much clearer subliminal sense of his exact movements- something it would take a gamer or multimedia geek to pick up on.
Running at sufficiently high framerates (say, over 80), the ideal density _would_ be 50/50, because as the speed is pushed, differences between frames become smaller. The end result would be strictly confined to the softening of just such edges that are moving the most, which would highlight exactly what types of motion are happening.
Serendipitously, this type of motion blur (being not a fancy cinematic 'blur' that you don't see ALL THE TIME anyhow, but time antialiasing) would be just as suited to the driver as the planned spatial antialiasing- and just as suitable for application to ALL extant games that can be played on a 3dfx card. Again, all that's needed is to buffer one frame and average it with the current frame. It's not supposed to be a lightsaber blur, and 3dfx is foolish to emphasize this concept.
Time-based antialiasing is just as effective as spatial antialiasing but people don't know what to look for, partly because nobody seems to be bothering to even try doing it properly! It'll be just the one frame buffered- or possibly two. For the purposes of 3dfx, clearly using a single extra buffer and setting a blend ratio is the way to go. For serious video, a better approach is this: think of the frames as one pixel _deep_ and treat the antialiasing as a sphere centering on each pixel. The most weight would be on the pixel being tested, the pixels that are directly left or right or up or down or earlier or later would have less of a weighting, and so on: a pixel that's one pixel up _and_ left _and_ a frame earlier would have the least weighting. I've had very good results experimenting with code that averages the frames directly before and after a frame, then doubles the size of the immediate frame and dithercopies it down to antialias it and averages it with the time shifted frames. The goal was to cut video noise, and this approach was very effective at doing so without causing lots of stupid blur. (anyone doing an open source video editing program might try this- I need to finish up my version if possible and gpl it ;) )
The long and the short of it is that 3dfx should offer this spatial antialiasing as an extra driver feature, and that Carmack shouldn't have to do anything to enable it- and the last thing you want is to dump lots of frames in for a nice pretty blur effect. As Carmack quite rightly says you can do that easily in the program anyhow and don't need special interaction with the card- the only thing he's not getting (and this is because 3dfx are pointedly not suggesting he try it) is that time based antialiasing really isn't his problem, and is an entirely undramatic effect, to be sensed rather than seen and marvelled at. And marvelling at effects might sell more 3D cards ;)
Again, the desired effects are practical rather than strictly visual in a 3D game. Racing and flying games would definitely be more exciting with such a driver feature, but in a 3D game it would be a matter of quickly sensing when a player you're chasing is turning or slowing- or whether you are dodging a flying projectile thoroughly enough. These things would be conveyed through the subtle softening of the lines perpendicular to motion- giving you more information than just the straight frames. (I really need to render up some demos of this...)
You're assuming with very little justification that Microsoft's business is solid, and that their books are honest, not to mention that their basic business plan is viable.
- Microsoft's business is in a severe drought- the biggest product is only W2K, and there's a howling void of other product ready to do major tonnage. Furthermore, W2K is evoking a very wait-and-see attitude from many unlikely sources, even the Gartner Group.
- Based on Microsoft's approach to truth and veracity in fscking COURT, what gives anyone the idea that they are being truthful in their accounting?
- Their business plan is _only_ viable as long as they can continue growing by 30% a quarter. That's a fscking insanely cancerous rate- and they ARE ALREADY FAILING to maintain it, and W2K doesn't look like it wil help. People say "The stock will always be a good buy because it will always grow at X% per quarter!" Reality check- what percentages do they have in their markets? 90%, 95%, 97%? Where is the room to grow there? They've hit the ceiling.
I saw one guy, an analyst, talk sense about all this. His words? "Get out." In fact he said 'you should have gotten out _before_ Monday'. I find that hard to argue with. _Nothing_ lasts forever. This touching belief in Microsoft is cargo-cult thinking.Actually, the poster child for (good) motion blur isn't FPSes at all. It's racing games and flightsims. Having the nearfield flickering semirandomly loses the sense of great speed. Even a small amount of general purpose motion blur would help this quite a bit. I concede that's Not Your Problem :)
Of course, the panorama is only a picture of my studio and "Dog" is a good song (sort of an instrumental groove jam with a happy upbeat feel, tight and gutsy) but that still fits in very nicely with my sense of what these divergent formats are for. I would be dismayed if the Quicktime media was getting all the downloads, as again it's closed and I don't like encouraging that.
Speaking of encouraging, I've been feeding my karma account (no not Slashdot karma, general karma) by making samples to share with other artists at mp3.com, sort of in a musician-style open source spirit. If any slashdotters want them, a highlight is the drum samples I made, those are at http://www.airwindows.com/studio/DrumSounds.zip and could come in handy. Hope people enjoy them, they're darn good samples :)
Really. From a purely IT perspective, if you obliterated Microsoft it would only help. Everything being done to support Microsoft products in the marketplace is being done by third parties anyhow.
Yes, the judge doesn't understand that Microsoft is criminal to the core. Yes, the judge is continually trying to look for a change of heart, a sign somebody there has a clue. Yes, MS is taking all of this as signs of weakness in a purely darwinian armwrestling match. But there's still the law, and there's still the judge- and Microsoft doesn't make all the rules. Who noticed all the details on the failure of settlement? Posner pointedly avoids laying blame for the failure on Microsoft- yet the last straw was when he read Microsoft's latest proposed terms. _I_ think Posner is going back to Jackson and saying "I give up. These guys are the biggest criminals I've ever seen! They're not even ashamed of it! Everything they've proposed has intentionally had loopholes you could drive a truck through, they don't even bother concealing it. They have no good faith at all, it's absolutely sick to watch. Nail 'em. Nobody can say we didn't try, and they can't even say I was prejudiced- I thanked them and implied it was the states' fault. Excuse me while I go _wash_ _my_ _hands_... euggggh!"
I'm serious- I think these judges have been beating their heads against Microsoft's obvious, relentless criminality, astonished that it doesn't even understand what they're trying to do. And I agree with Cringely that MS can see this only as a sign of weakness, because they are so far outside the law in their heads that they can't even comprehend it (something which shocks the hell out of the judges). But Cringely is wrong if he thinks that is going to help them- MS is NOT the law, and to the legal system, it is not a defense to say "I am innocent because all this legal stuff is crap anyway! I kick ass wherever I want and you can't stop me 'cause you're weak and cowardly!". That is... not an effective position to take.
It is the position Microsoft believes, in its heart. And so, I see Posner giving up, going irreconcilably against Microsoft (Posner's first love is the law, not power) and cleverly issuing statements to block even the implication that he was biased and quit due to unfair prejudice against Microsoft. His statement seeming to blame the states... is for the appeals courts to appreciate, not us.
However, I have the file relegated to a text link, because I'm not about to go embedding it in my page- I don't consider it right to imply that Quicktime is part of the normal web browsing experience, any more than WMP should be. So my 'extended media' sits under a text link like the sideshow it basically is.
For my music I go with mp3, with a vengeance. (and actually it's doing real well- I've been doing some instrumental pieces, and my bouncy rocking instrumental "Dog" is beating Carmine Appice w. Richie Sambora, and another track of Carmine Appice with Brian May, in the charts! www.mp3.com/ChrisJ) So I'm really pushing mp3 hard- and mpeg in general, in fact I had some video clips on my site and pulled the Sorenson Quicktimes leaving only the abbreviated, hacked ASTARTE-demo mpegs up even though they could only run a few seconds.
Speaking of which- thank you Millenium *rejoice rejoice* for tipping me off to Movie2MPEG! Made my day- I really _needed_ that! I'm going to see if I can re-do some of my video stuff using this.
So basically, my position is this: I like Quicktime, I use it for authoring, but I'm very reluctant to publish in it. Why? Not quality, it's better than MPEG and does amazing things many of which I understand and can use. It's that it's not open- and I just can't support that in a format. It's as bad as using Word format....