Hey, I've written CmdrTaco but didn't hear back or anything- do you guys at Geeks In Space want any music composed for you, stuff to throw in or anything? I'm serious- I've been a slashdotter from way back and I have this killer studio now and I'd like to do some giving back. I totally relate to 'gift culture' when it comes to my music. Seems like that's the natural way for it to go.
And, you know, I'd also really really like the opensource-like benefit of status and appreciation- but ya know it seems like that's going to happen anyhow regardless on account of I don't suck:) "Dog" debuted at 54 (out of over 10,000) on the mp3.com instrumental rock charts! And it's still there and sneaking slowly up the main charts- in fact it's on page two of the instrumental rock chart webpages, and that's from a totally new artist who's never been seen on mp3.com before. "Horse" is also quite good but I think "Dog" is the breakout hit. They're both going to be heard a lot- they're both free- they're both licensed for radio station play, for that matter.
So can I do anything for Geeks In Space? I really like it. I also have this monster studio from hell going, and there are a lot of neat sounds and effects and riffs and things I could give Geeks In Space. Whaddya need?
"One of my friends once made a joking suggestion that we should get together a bunch of scary BOFH types, and call them the Spam Patrol. Have them dig up spammers' real addresses, and show up at the spammer's home in black suits and dark sunglasses. Have them stop in to chat. The spokesperson would calmly and patiently explain why Spam is Bad -- theft of resources, cost-shifting, etc, etc. Meanwhile, the four or five other Scary BOFH Types would simply wander around the living room and comment about how nice a house it was, wouldn't it be a pity if, etc."
Ohhhhh, I like this. I like it very much. I would point out that it's much much better to not have the others making threatening (and actionable) remarks at all. Have them just be there in a chillingly disciplined manner, saying nothing.
Ohhhhh, I'd pay to get to do that. Maybe someone should try to organize this:) pity I don't have a black suit. I do have imitation Blues Bros. sunglasses:)
If you ever figure out how to nuke UUnet, for God's sake don't spare the plutonium! I use a lookup service to not have to fuss terribly much over filing complaint reports (Spamcop). I always look at the full information, and I refuse to send to their dumb 'Spam Recycling Center' links as I don't trust that as far as I could throw it.
Yet even with all that, I _still_ am beginning to hate uunet more and more. I've taken to adding little personal notes to my customary remarks- like "Please kill this spammer's account, oh UUnet source of my unending torments and target of my everlasting loathing and hatred. -postmaster@airwindows.com" It seems to make no difference and only relieves my feelings a bit. UUnet never stops giving spammers accounts and I'm damned if I can figure out if they even restrict them in the slightest way. I've heard they might do something like give warnings and say 'Send to other emails, ones that don't complain to us!' which is not an acceptable response.
Could _somebody_ please rip uunet's head off and #*$% down their neck? As a personal favor to me and Denor here?:P
Of course it can't be some county jail. We do have a class-stratified society, after all, and Gates is upper class by virtue of money and power. He will never, never, _ever_ see some 'San Berdino' jail. However, it might be more plausible to see him in posh federal prison- as expected, with cable and good food yada yada- and BARS, quietly there somewhere. It may be posh but there you'll still stay, and that's kind of the point, isn't it?
My only concern is this: is this a civil case? It might not be an option without a criminal suit. But I really want to see Gates, Ballmer, anyone else responsible for setting the tone of this company, behind bars for however short a time. It is a point that must be made in some way. Hitting them with a pie in the face is just silliness. Hitting them with an Uzi in the face is being LIKE THEM in spirit. That's just wrong. They need to be held accountable for the type of behavior they've forced MS into believing is normal and sanctioned.
Put all the responsible decision-making execs in jail for an absolute minimum of six months, or at least six weeks. This includes Gates. Hell, being put in jail for six _days_ would be enough to provide a reality check. Anything.
After the jail time the execs would be barred from working in the computer industry. If it's good enough for Kevin Mitnick... Note, no fines. Who would notice? These are robber barons.
Microsoft gets found formally guilty of abuse of monopoly power.
And fined one dollar.
No more would be necessary.
Seriously. No breakup, no huge fines- all that is needed is to cut off its head (the execs that continue to resist market-owner complacency and bureaucratic internal rot), make it vulnerable to a million class action suits, and allow it to follow the usual course of gradually encroaching irrelevance and out-of-touchness, like the last days of the dinosaurs.
The head guys at MS are _crazy_. They are a particular type of crazy that makes it possible to whip a vast organization into action and motivate it with their values. Unfortunately, their values are quite criminal: "win, cheat, don't get caught and if you are, lie". Run this way, the whole company becomes one titanic mugger- but its natural behavior without this continuing drive from above is far lazier and less dangerous. There have been many reports on how Microsoft suffers from the usual bigness syndrome- middle managers building status by _not_ answering their phones to look busier, that sort of corporate idiocy. Dilbertization. You have to have a grudging respect for a upper management that can restrain this tendency at all, through fear and insatiableness and fits of temper when needed- the natural tendency is for MS to get fat and happy and lazy, but the upper mgmt. are CRAZY and will NEVER be satisfied, hence the current situation.
Make MS vulnerable to class action suits by a guilty verdict, and remove the crazy upper management. Jail Gates and co. and block them from working in the industry again. And then leave Microsoft to go its own way, following its own lead, and it will dwindle and be reduced by the market forces it's been trying so hard to avoid all this time.
This is a silly topic to study on, yet I am immensely gratified that someone, somewhere, is willing to just be curious and study it. That curiosity, not the expectation of profitable results, is what science is really about, and it lives.:)
Sweet:) and I for one am not surprised. 'Altivec' aka 'Velocity Engine' is a bunch of _general_ _purpose_ big-ass registers which are not shared with FP registers or hobbled unreasonably. PPC is already incredibly register-rich (what is it, 32 int and 32 FP and now 32 128-bit altivec registers? That can work like 192 32-bit registers (yes you can treat them like divided address spaces- multiple values) versus Intel which gets what, 8? 16? 32? and shares its vector processing with FP registers.
Please, if anyone can flame my data and correct it I beg of you to do so;) but I'm not a bit surprised that G4s are doing this. Altivec lends itself to big data operations, not just vector processing. Memory moves are faster 128 bits at a time, and so on. Screen blitting, likewise. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if someone is working on an optimized X that uses G4 altivec acceleration- that would seem to be a no-brainer.
"Revolution" was _Lennon's_ song, not McCartney's- and McCartney doesn't even have rights to it now- Michael Jackson does, and if I'm not imagining things I've heard it used in commercials by now.
McCartney may or may not be taking an active role in this, but in effect he is hurting me, something I do not appreciate. I have not ever downloaded a _single_ thing off 'My Mp3.com' (their commercial-music mirroring service). I _upload_ to mp3.com (links siggified, knowing that slashdot gets royally sick of hearing the same plea 27 times in a row!) and get over 100 megs of web hosting for my music at no charge, in exchange for giving only _nonexclusive_ rights to 'em. McCartney is looking to take this away from me- though I doubt he's even thought it through.
Part of the reason I even picked mp3.com for this, knowing that they are the focal point for these attacks, is because I want to be in a position to take part in a sort of judo-like attack back at the RIAA and these other attackers. If they manage to harm the _original_ part of mp3.com significantly (I really don't care about My Mp3.com) then they are harming me and a _lot_ of other musician types, many of whom take the music mirroring concept a lot more seriously than I do. Can you say 'class action suit'? I knew you could... If these litigous idiots manage to hurt MY ACCESS to media as an independent artist (christ, I'm not even asking for equal time for promotion, or whatever- it's fine if I just sit there on mp3.com having to fend for myself to get publicity- I'm talking about losing access, about building a web presence that gets harmed through a lawsuit to a _separate_ part of the site!) then I will seriously want to be part of a retaliatory lawsuit.
Go ahead and get them to kill the commercial music mirroring, Paul- I can see the argument that this is important and the wave of the future, but it's clearly also a very daring attempt to redefine the law by acting on what it 'should' mean.
But all this defending of the faith is mostly the protecting of a music machine that built _you_, Paul- they have been selling _your_ music for 30 years and more, and have increasingly little interest in making any new 'product'. And maybe you, personally, have had ENOUGH from that work done 30 years ago. You're trying to still be paid to this day from work you did literally before I was born. Record some new songs if you want new money- I personally have no problem with your insisting that every note is commerce and must be bought and paid for- my problem is when your actions begin to step on my ability to have access to media (I'm thinking of the mp3 format in general here, and the mp3.com site in particular as a 'prime location' due to the domain name and size of it).
I hope this all ends up with My Mp3.com either dead or not- but the mp3.com _I_ use still alive. In some ways the mp3.com guy reminds me of Malcolm McLaren, though I know he's not really that clever. If your band can't get a gig- get them arrested. If the band isn't even popular enough to get arrested- get yourself, the manager, arrested! And so he is.
I just hope it stirs up curiosity about what mp3.com used to be- it's incredibly insulting if mp3.com, with tens of thousands of bands and songs of all different quality levels, is treated as just an illegal pirating website for _industry_ music. Putting that spin on it is _amazingly_ insulting.
"I will rant, it will fall on deaf ears,b ut thats ok".
Well... you've outright said you're not listening to _me_. I've been playing music for almost 20 years, I've paid money to take music business courses and educated myself about the reality of the situation and devoted some hard thought to what's really going on here but I'm coming out for mp3s so you're going to ignore it by default. I've been talking to an LA producer who likes my stuff and ought to be able to get some people listening to it, and _he_ doesn't bat an eyelash at this sort of thing, yet you strike up a noisy bad stance and expect to be taken as the voice of reason.
If you refuse to listen to my 'anecdotal evidence' even though I'm demonstrably a musician who happens to be a/.er, why on earth should I listen to you? I think you're trying to reduce a new situation to a series of easily defeatable strawmen. In doing so you're attacking MY resources. I really, _really_ don't appreciate your trying to kill off the only form of media that remains entirely within my control...
Surely you are not the real Lux Interior (of the Cramps) because the Cramps are definitely not lowest echelon- they're quite good and have a respectable back catalog, I would be really surprised to hear a band that in theory had all the benefits of the industry described as "very-lowest-echelon struggling-musician-types".
Given that you are not the real Lux Interior of the Cramps, what does the real Lux Interior think about this issue?
Besides which, you're very much in error if you think mp3 pirating gives away your rights. It fails to produce mechanical royalties, is what it does. Nothing about it takes away from your copyright and ownership of the music because no matter how much you give it away that doesn't mean someone else wrote it. You're more likely to lose rights to your music by signing with a major label- read your contract if you ever get one, you won't be able to negotiate any parts of it away and you may well be signing away your copyrights to the label.
If not for record companies we _would_ have many albums that are lost forever now. This is because record companies have taken to phasing out old tape storage vaults to make room for more Spice Girls masters- and have been known to throw out whole _shelves_ of old jazz master tapes, for instance, totally ignoring the please of conservationists and collectors who've asked (begged) the labels, "Please let us take these off your hands and store them ourselves at our expense!". No dice. The masters are _destroyed_ to save the expense of storing them, and some of our musical heritage dies with them.
Sorry about that, but you didn't really pick the best example. Are you sure the Arvo Part or Harry Partch masters still exist? I _think_ that no Charlie Parker master tapes have ever been destroyed to save a huge record corporation a buck- yet. Give 'em another 20 years and they'll be destroying Miles Davis masters to save costs on storing the tapes. I'm sorry- this is already underway and you cannot save the tapes and the labels will not give up the masters they are destroying- you'd better believe people tried- it's gone on for _years_, there was an expose on this practice in The Absolute Sound v17 issue 80 (published in 1992).
This is _not_ the argument to use to argue that record companies are not inherently evil.
Speaking as a sound engineer and operator of a project recording studio which rivals or beats the most expensive industry studios due to geek ingenuity and hacking with the equipment until it sounds better (for an example check out Horse at mp3.com, that uses the new studio), I say: Woohoo!
Oh, please, please, mainstream industry, go right ahead and grunge up the audio quality of your CDs with watermark bullshit that 'consumers can't really hear anyway'. Oh, _do_ please encode in copy protection crud all over the music. You're talking to someone who always does fades (as at the end of 'Horse' in analog because digital fades are too grungy. You're talking to someone who's studied the sound engineering trademarks of the greatest selling albums of all time. You have no idea how dangerous such a suggestion really is >:)
Let me put it this way: I work quite hard and devote years of experience to producing a level of sound quality that beats what the major labels, with all their money, can produce. I can do it because technology's gotten lazy in some ways- digital can record subsonics happily but most equipment starts rolling off at maybe 35hz because supposedly people can't 'hear' lower (this in an era that has seen the emergence of thunder-trucks and vans with gigawatts of bass power!). Digital can even produce passably airy and natural highs but most equipment screws this up horribly by killing the almost nonexistent analog-chip hiss of their output stages with horrible ringy ceramic HF-rolloff caps. And in most cases the ultra-expensive studios the industry labels use still suffer from these judgement errors, using equipment _built_ to not give a truly full range.
I can beat the major labels much of the time due to hardware-hacker tricks of this type (and gladly share them). If the major labels take to putting _watermarks_ into all their CDs to interfere with mp3ing- particularly if it's for tracking stuff after it has been mp3ed- then they will be charging $14 for music with a thin, unpleasant haze on the high frequencies- and rather than simply beating their audio quality, I will be able to _maim_ and _stomp_ and _humiliate_ their audio quality, and for free >:)
So please, please, industry, you know the consumer can't hear and won't listen and doesn't care- put watermarks into all the CDs!;) It won't hurt anything to lower the sound quality just a little bit- not like there is anybody out there _competing_ with you or anything;) go ahead! You can even charge a little more because it is 'secure';) that's the ticket!
Please, industry, just a _bit_ more arrogance and contempt! You're not dying fast enough and I would greatly appreciate it if you make it even _easier_ for just me and my equipment to compete directly with you;)
Anybody reading this, if you'd like airwindows to do a digital mastering job for you (ADAT 20 or 16 bit, 1/4" tape 7.5 or 15 ips, cassette or vinyl transfers), write chrisj@airwindows.com and say you saw it on slashdot and I'll digitally master your material for _free_. You will need to either travel to Vermont or pay shipping for your master tapes to get here and back. Hear what your music sounds like mastered through a custom board and handmade cabling capable of subsonic to supersonic signal carrying, with EQs to control it perfectly! All playback devices (ADAT, reel to reel _and_ even tape cassette) specially customised to give significantly wider range than anything you can buy off the shelf!
(Yes, I'm serious! This industry jihad is pissing me off;) I happen to be able to afford to earn nothing at all from my sound engineering, for the moment, just to be able to insult the mainstream industry. If any of you ever wanted a professional mastering job done, talk to me and we'll work something out. You _don't_ have to be signed to a major label to have access to professional recording or mastering quality.)
Let me be the second one who specifically went and copied and italicised this remark:
"Why would anybody sit down and write a novel if it's going to be pirated for free the first day it's released?"
Ye gods. You'd better ask Emily Dickinson that, my friend. In fact, you don't have to (she's dead and still more lastingly popular than you could hope to be)- you can ask me. I have written a novel and put it up on the net to be 'pirated for free'. Ask _me_.
I'll tell you why: the story needed to be told. As it grew I eventually realised I was telling a story, also, about how the world seemed to me at the time- without intending it, the fiction and invention became a kind of communication. It became a means of self expression- and also an exercise in the joy of sheer craftmanship. I once told somebody I met in a bookstore about how I wrote the ending to Kings Of Rainmoor, and how through a series of twist endings and unexpected but inevitable surprises I ended it in a very artistic and appropriate way- and she was most impressed, and got some of the sense of _rightness_ I feel about that ending. And that sense is what writing the book was _for_... I created something that has power and beauty to me (and to other people, too.)
It's the same with my MP3 songs and MP3 instrumentals. Let's look at the latter for a second. I'm in the process of doing an album on animal themes, and I had some music in my head that gave a very romantic sense of what a Horse is (we're talking teenage girl obsessiveness levels of romanticism;) ). I could hear it, could feel it wanting to exist- and through a lot of work and the application of skills I've spent a lot of years learning, I got it on tape- it's at the 'MP3 instrumentals' link above, named "Horse", naturally. I ran about trying to tell people it was there, too, because it's one of the finest bits of art I've ever done. I ran across a person on a MUCK who was a big horse lover (or, rather, a unicorn fancier) and he listened to it- and was blown away! And that validated all the effort I'd put in- because in part musical art is the fiction of imagining stuff and playing it, but it is also communication, and I was able to communicate to another person the almost mystical romanticism I was trying to express in pure _sound_. That's fscking magic, to be able to do that. It's addictive. Who the hell needs to get money to justify being able to wreak magic? I wonder if these 'artists' who don't understand this are even able to come up with even scant milliamps of magic. That seems simply pathetic to me- I know what I want and we're not even speaking the same language, it seems. When I get things set up right, work really hard, maybe bleed or get a few blisters from strenuous playing or drumming, and find the right listener (because there's always a right listener), I get to produce whole _amps_ of magic, I get to every now and then hit people with a charge of music like a lightning bolt and _stun_ them with art. I hardly exaggerate to say that I live for that- certainly I know musicians who can stun _me_ in turn. The Pixies, Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits have all managed to stun me one way or another with music (Beefheart is the man who said, "I'd like to give my music away because where I got it, you didn't have to pay for it"!). From the slush piles of mp3.com I've also found the same charge- there's this band Creeper Lagoon- most of their stuff didn't hit me so hard but this one song, "Drop Your Head" stunned me. And there it is- it's the visceral response to art, to music.
Reading Puff Daddy's take on the matter is even more ludicrous than reading the pop music hacks' take on it. Are we or are we not talking about a rapper who takes complete works of music by somebody else, grabs some loops out of the song, basically using those MUSICIANS' best notes for nothing, _talks_ over them (shouts? rants?) and thinks _he_ is guaranteed income from this? That's fscking ludicrous. Look, I have that MP3 instrumentals area. Some of it, particularly the albumlength workout 'Extended Play' (which has been compared to 'really good Yes, or King Crimson') is absolutely _begging_ to have bits of it looped and used as a more rock-derived rap backing, a more snarling distorted driving beat. It's wide-range, it's fierce, it's just waiting to be sampled. I'd like to see Puff Daddy go raid _my_ music, grab notes that I sweated over and got blisters over, do some rap over them and then claim _he_ is entitled to money for it. How much time does he spend compared to how much time and effort I spend on the source for those 'fair use' loops?
And yet I'm not arguing that he shouldn't be able to do that- I'm arguing that he doesn't have special rights to money on that basis. If he finds people who want to watch him rap in person to my music as a backing loop, I for one will not bitch. If people want to buy physical media from him on that basis, I'll let it pass and will cheerfully allow him to not give me a dime for it. If he thinks he's _entitled_ to payment just for having done this, then I would have to ask whether I was _entitled_ to payment in turn for supplying those theoretical loops.
The logical conclusion is this: these frustrated pop business majors are _obligated_ to stop attempting to record music, because they can't guarantee that they are paid for every playing of a note (many use session men so they are trying to guarantee that they are paid for the playing of _someone_ _else's_ note). For the rap artists who feel this way, they are obligated to try and be paid for every word. Since rap is music of the streets and is taken from life and performed by people who live what they rap, the rap artists are logically obligated to try and be paid for every word they ever utter, and need to walk about with a big sack (and, presumably, a gun) speaking to people and taking money from them in payment for their rap performances. Since this is certifiably insane behavior, they will then get locked up and the rest of us can go on with our lives:)
Including me, finishing this post and signing it with the URLs where I give my art to my listeners:
God, I'm all over this story;) however, I must speak up here. I'm the slashdotter who's been going on about recording other opensource geeks for free as long as they promise to release free mp3s and withhold nothing. However, before today I didn't have much to demonstrate to show what this would mean. Now... I do.
http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ is the place you can find mp3s produced in my new studio- if you download only one track make it "Horse", though "Whale" is also recorded in the new studio. I flat out defy anyone to match that recording quality with anything short of a insanely expensive and sophisticated full recording studio. I am a sound engineer geek, this is my thing- and an open source geek, so I am _ready_ to provide that proper recording studio to other people like me. I just finished talking to an independent LA producer on a MUCK for whom I'm going to make guitar and bass samples- in return he'll get some more people listening to my art, which is all I'm asking of a person in his position. It's barter, and it's networking, and it works. And here I am- to most comers (where I'm doing it out of commerce not love) I'm billing $75 an hour for studio time which includes me in there doing everything up to production, studio musician, cheerleader and psychologist;) I have had good results enticing and conning great performances out of musicians, such as getting a keyboard player to play more solid bass-keyboard parts by showing him what just bass+drums sound like (he cut the part way back- his tape ended up grooving like mad!) or getting a classical guitarist to transition mentally from a baroque piece to a flamenco piece ("No, the slightly muted note was _okay_... relax, let's put some _garlic_ on this performance! Get right into it, you're not playing Baroque this time").
And again, I may be out of my depth for promotion and advertising, I may not be equipped to manufacture CDs, I may not be interested in judging music crap (I have found that you can bring music out of just about anybody if you're a good producer, so nobody is 'crap', they are mostly just badly handled), but I'm raising my hand to be counted as part of the 'new structure arising' to provide what people think you need major labels for.
Because you don't need major labels for that. Period. >:)
For that matter, there are some of us who are doing OK money-wise and are simply stuck waving their little hands for attention in a crowded room the size of the Earth- the internet >:)
It's all very well giving the Spice Girls $10, or Goo Goo Dolls, but the reason you know to download their mp3s is that you have _heard_ them. How about giving some of the netizens a bit of the time and attention that's normally shoved down your throat by the labels' starmaking machinery? How about every Slashdot reader musician who reads this, follow up to this post with the information where to download your music and a pointer to whatever it is you want to highlight.
I'll kick it off with great seriousness as just today I released a track on mp3.com which I'm real proud of. Spent days on it and even rebuilt some of my equipment to produce this music. It's got a real 'old Pink Floyd' vibe to it and exemplifies what I myself want to see in 'non-industry-machine' music. It's for an 'animal themes' album, and is called "Horse", and is probably the single most different thing you could be listening to right now, plus it's _very_ high audio quality thanks entirely to geek ingenuity and willingness to tinker with the equipment;)
It is at http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and dammit, I don't even care about who gets the 10$: I don't _make_ music to get money (if I want that, I can record people using world-class sound engineering skills and charge them, legitimately, for the service of putting my skills at their disposal). I make music to be listened to, and because I must, because I hear it in my dreams and because it moves my hands and feet when I'm not paying attention and because it makes me live. I don't want money for it- I want it to be heard!
For radio fans there are many song-type songs at http://www.mp3.com/RFW. I wouldn't want to underplay those even if my geek nature likes "Horse" best at the moment because of its sonic characteristics:)
Who else of the slashdot readers creates music and wants a chance at a listening? Post a reply and I promise that I for one will go listen to every musician who posts a URL:) and for those of you who aren't musicians, the sick thing is that while you're talking about sending 10$ to the artist, most acts on a place like mp3.com do not even get ONE listen, at all. So anyone who follows up can be pleased in the knowledge that I at least will give them a listen, thus jumping them over 50% of the other acts in the ratings:)
"This is the time to be thoughtful, be expressive, be generous. Be "taken advantage of." The channels exist now to give creativity away, at no cost, to millions. Never mind if you make large sums of money along the way. If you successfully seize attention, nothing is more likely. In a start-up society, huge sums can fall on innocent parties, almost by accident. That cannot be helped, so don't worry about it any more. Henceforth, artistic integrity should be judged, not by ones classic bohemian seclusion from satanic mills and the grasping bourgeoisie, but by what one creates and gives away. That is the only scale of noncommercial integrity that makes any sense now." -Bruce Sterling
OK: I caught this article in the middle of recording in the nice ADAT-based studio I've gone in debt for- I'm just about to lay a drum track over an instrumental called "Horse", one of the tracks for my album 'anima' that is about catching the spirit of different animals in musical composition. The geek connection here is that the Alesis D4 drum module wouldn't put out enough output to peak the ADAT's inputs, so I had to take it apart and rewire the headphone outputs to the aux jacks on the back, actually soldering special wires directly to the chip for a super-direct signal path. I'm pretty pleased with "Horse": I might still replace the rhythm guitars but it's looking pretty finished, and when I'm done it goes up on mp3.com- which brings me to the point of my post.
HELL YES, I'd like to be listened to! I'm a damn musician! I've been playing for almost TWENTY years, and write good songs and think of interesting musical experiments for instrumentals, and 'musician Matt Rose' speaks for me bigtime.
In fact, you know what? Currently I do not have ANY way in place for listeners to pay me. There's no CD yet. No T-Shirts;) wups, sorry! I guess you'll just have to listen to my art FOR FREE. I guess you'll have to shake off the assumptions pounded into your head by a culture industry, that nothing's good unless it costs money and has the little alligator logo on it or says Ralph Lauren or Pokemon or Spice Girls on it, and you'll have to go download years of artistic work for FREE with my BLESSING because, slashdot geek-type open source people, that is what I want to do with it. Is that so hard to understand to opensource types? Isn't it kind of similar to the free software spirit? And, in fact, I also write some computer software- and GPL it. I'm not some random musician hitting Slashdot to hype- I post here all the time, my user page says Chris Johnson (580)! And I also compose music- a lot of it- and dearly wish for it to be heard. When I come out with political geek-oriented music (two songs in the works already, "Blue Collar Computer Technician Man" and "Options Vesting Party", the first is a heavy blues and the second insists on being country for some reason:) ) I want people to be listening.
So, please do? Some of you broadband folks, general music enjoyers, anyone, everyone? I have songs up at http://www.mp3.com/RFW which stands for The Room Full Of Windows, the 'song project' which will get the geek songs when I record them. I'll make recommendations too as there are a lot of songs there: If you like mean blues in the BOFH spirit, listen to "Staring Down The Phone". If you like sad pretty harmonies, "Just Another Someone Turned Away". If you want maximum angst done well, "December" is for you (or maybe it _is_ you;) it was me at the time!) If you like a more upbeat rock check out "Stupid Faith In You". I got up to some Who-esque walls of guitar chords in "Color Me Gone" which is also upbeat and grooves really nicely. Finally, my personal favorite would be "The Rules"- it's sweet but intelligent and has a lot of humor in it, and sums up my geek outlook on life:)
Then I also have instrumental music up at http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ. This is a bit sparser- contains a reggae lead guitar workout, "Variations On A Sicilian Poodle", a very long-play rock jam segmented into three parts to fit on mp3.com, "Extended Play" (think of it as like the rock version of techno background hacking music, also it is very high audio quality especially bass) and the first 'anima' track, "Whale" which is also the first track from my new studio which I'll record geeks in for free if they can journey here at their own expense (I can't be paying airfare:) ) These instrumentals, especially "Extended Play" and "Variations On A Sicilian Poodle" also work as killer audio test records, even in mp3 form- especially into the bass, I have a heavily custom board and the bass on these extends waaaaaay down into subwoofer territory, use it to show off your audio gear. iMac transparent subwoofers need not apply;)
Gah- now there's no time to lay down the drum track, I have to go return a CD-Rom burner! I'm not sorry *g* slashdot's a net-home for me and I gladly blow off audio work until later to communicate with my people:) I'll get to it later. But for god's sake, man- go listen to the free music! Get a fellow geek on the mp3.com charts. It's the only way you can give me anything for the years of work I put in, 'cos I have NOTHING to sell you. Everybody always says 'Oh, I will give the artist $5 to encourage them!' but I got no CD to sell at the moment so even if you love the music you can't give me money for it. So go download it again or tell somebody about the geek opensource-writing hardware-hacking crazy musician who wants to be heard. Maybe CmdrTaco would like me to record some free musical bits for Geeks In Space! I've listened to every GIS, it would be fun to give it some music that wasn't 303-music:)
Gotta run! go take free music from me! these super army tanks are free and get 200 mpg and I'll come over and remix them while you sleep! (get away from me you freak! Don't you know everybody listens to station wagons?);)
Yes, I also have that feeling, odd though it may seem. Many of their recent moves seem to betray a sense of desperation- case in point, their trying to invalidate NT4 MCSEs and earn money off their MCSEs by forcing new courses (a really dangerous move.) The smart thing would be to subsidise those MCSEs and keep them happy- maybe they can't afford it? How much is X-Box costing them? Were any of the demos real? People seem unusually willing to accept their word that the demos are real considering that these are people who got caught IN OPEN COURT faking video evidence before a federal judge! (But they wouldn't lie to meeeee!) People seem unusually ready to protest that they do good work based on a sort of catchetism (sp?) that The Best Man Wins thus making them good by _default_ (remember that Hacker Diet page with the sidebar on the Excel spreadsheets and exactly why no two versions of Excel were compatible with each other? Real 'good' work there).
I think they are indeed panicing/desperate, and I'll go on record as saying, this early, that they are financially overextended (yes they had a lot of money, but a Microsoft can also BURN a hell of a lot of money in half-assed projects and featherbedding) which sets them up for one hell of a crash. Not a 'panicky investor crash', I'm talking a 'investigation reveals MS actually is 75 grand in the red and can't make its payroll' kind of crash (in general terms, not that specific headline): a situation where everything's covered up until the last possible minute, nobody will believe a word of it, until the story eventually breaks causing _major_ shock and astonishment. Again, the essence of the story would be simply that MS spends more than it makes, and that this eventually _will_ matter.
Might the mechanics of breakup perhaps reveal some of this? It would be very funny in a cruel way- rather than MS trying to hold out and conceal secret wealth and power, MS could be trying like hell to conceal secret _rot_, secret debt and the _real_ balance sheet.
What do they really have? I wouldn't say 'Office and the development tools'- I'd say, what do they really have besides the reputation of absolutely unchallengable wealth and influence? What would happen if Microsoft was to say 'We can't afford that'? The idea seems unthinkable- well, I'm thinking it. Again, how much is X-Box costing them? How much did W2K cost them, how much did the consumer W2K cost before it was abandoned and switched over to Windows Me? How much is _that_ costing them?
If I had to pick, out of the blue, a single word that to me was an example of the sort of word that might be a problem using commercially (say in a domain name for an unrelated purpose), "Coke" would be right at the top of the list. It has other meanings- but 99% means the sodapop, and everybody knows it, and the primary other meaning is illegal and even then the similarity with the sodapop name is a running gag (ever seen a 'Cocaine' T-Shirt done to appear like the Coke logo?) Hell, "Coke" even has its own logo on the Coca-Cola can! Look above where it says 'classic' in a square box above 'original formula'.
That said, this still reduces to an absurd situation where you can't put 'Coke' in any domains, subdomains, etc etc without being hassled. What's needed is some good solid rulings in court saying "Grabbing and holding the.com is ENOUGH! You don't have to hassle everyone on the planet. If 'coke' means 'small purple fish' in Zabongahelian, well then "coke.zb" can go on meaning a fish restaraunt's web presence WITHOUT weakening Coca-Cola's trademark claim- because they hold the.com and are doing business using that as a trademark in many countries.
It's the fear of the unknown: "Does coke.zb mean that we lose our trademark all over the world? *quake, tremble*" that causes the abuses. You have to immunize these big companies from their fears of losing what they're entitled to. They have a perfect right to own the name 'Coke' as applied to beverages. They've a right to be scared if they think they could end up losing that. They need some clear rules formally making them safe from the threat of losing all their trademark stuff just for not hassling domain holders in Zabongahelia. Without such assurance, they are compelled to really be destructive and draconian, because it's out of fear and nobody can tell them they _won't_ lose their important trademarks over such a thing.
Unfortunately, the corollary here is that, just as 90% of web publishing is crap- 90% of what gets published as books is _also_ crap >:)
Personally, I went with web publishing through impatience with the normal routine. First agent I tried (totally 'cold calling') was the Maas Agency. Struck out (have since learned that it was insanity to even attempt them, but it was fun). Second agent I tried bit, and asked for the rest of "The Kings Of Rainmoor" to read. I sat for months, in an agony of uncertainty, knowing that the guy _had_ expressed an interest- and finally, politely, he passed, citing a big workload.
There was no third try. I plead a low tolerance for sitting around in an agony of uncertainty. I don't write to be _not_ read.
For that matter, I don't play music to be not listened to: as of a few days ago I have most of my song catalog up at http://www.mp3.com/RFW, and I'm working on getting instrumental stuff up at http://www.mp3.com/chrisj (currently not online as the songs have just been uploaded)
With all of this, my motives are a lot like OSS coders in some ways. I can do these things. They are entertainment things. Where is it written that I have to withhold them and extort money off them and all that rot? I get by- I may never, ever, own a house or something like that, but I don't starve and I have a place to stay. What I would like most of all is to be IN PEOPLE'S FACES making art and GIVING it away. If you want to get picky, I'm expecting to be able to sell _studio_ time and my talents as a sound engineer- and even then, as I've said before, I'll work for open source types who are willing to release the result freely as mp3 for nothing! (_they_ pay cabfare to Brattleboro Vermont, tho)
The era we're starting to enter has some very interesting qualities. It allows pretty much global networking of talents, and the only downside is that you don't just hear about the 'slush pile'- you're soaking in it! But by the same token, word can get out about one of the ten percenters really quick. I know I work pretty hard to be one of those ten percenters- though there are areas, still (like C coding) where I just lose:)
In a way that's why I am so committed to the mp3 revolution that I've put out basically _everything_ as mp3 with no attempt to get money off it. I want people to see that you can do that- it's like OSS coding, people eventually had to _see_ that you could work together giving your code away and that it was all right and even beneficial. I want OSS for artists. I want to show that the qualities for artistic success are talent and hard work- not greed and marketing. I don't know if that'll happen, but it's not for lack of trying- and I have nothing to lose, I can survive even in total obscurity, and in fact I needn't even pay for the 100 megs of broadband web hosting required to store my current mp3 catalog- because I give it to mp3.com, too, and they have nonexclusive rights to it. So even if I get nothing else, my willingness to give out this stuff freely gets me web hosting that would cost me a hundred bucks a month from my current provider. (It gets me no promo, of course- it's all one big slush pile.)
"I'd like to give my music away, because where I got it, you didn't have to pay for it." -Captain Beefheart
Of course Tog will help. The thing is, there are some things you've got to do for him to help.
read his books, at least Tog On Interface
THINK. What does all this mean? Why was he testing on smart, clued people who'd never seen a computer before? Is this really 'design for idiots' or is it actually 'finding what conclusions are typically drawn by an untutored user'?
USE it.
I'd like to see more X apps use Mac/Win mouse text selection behavior, particularly Mac type drag and drop of selections with the little visual cues to what's happening. Not because this is 'like what I already know': I'm equally willing to learn other rules, but Tog-ized text selection behavior is just better thought out, and quicker to understand, due to smart assumptions about what happens when you do things.
This is a way Tog can help immensely without even paying attention directly. I wonder, if the wish is for Tog to actively help out with UI, what is he expected to do? "Help make three-button X text handling more intuitive!" "Help make our Excel-type button bar more intuitive!" Sometimes the answer is "You can't."
I've personally had experience with advanced UI and seen what happens. It was a couple years ago, and I began using the now-abandoned-by-MS-pressure Apple internet suite, 'Cyberdog'. This was revolutionary in several ways- it was massively object-oriented, using OpenDoc (and many parts were released for it, too- few _containers_ tho) but what I am referring to is specifically the interface aspects of it, and what they meant.
Cyberdog let you abstract all sorts of internet resources into an iconlike object. Email addresses would, when doubleclicked, make a 'To:' email to the address, or could be dragged into text or a header field and write the required text- basically everytime you did something that seemed plausible, it did what you wanted. FTP site addresses could open on the desktop like a Finder window to a remote site, or could be dragged to browser windows etc etc. Web bookmarks, likewise- telnet never quite got debugged but tried to open a terminal window- and all of these could exist as a simple bookmark file anywhere on your HD, complete with distinctive icon- or it could be dragged into a container object, the Notebook, a yellow-lined window with a sort of tree-view structure where you could store _lots_ of these references, or indeed aliases to anything else on your HD you wanted.
The Notebook container could also be used as an object- and this is where the user interface started to become unexpectedly powerful.
You _could_ convince notebooks to hold links to other notebooks- but this isn't what I mean, it's more of a top-level organizing tool. Go back with me to the peak of Cyberdog community- people were interacting on a special Apple Usenet server where you could post binaries, including Cyberdog rich text. What that meant was this: you could drag images etc. into your message and they'd be displayed inline. You could make a rich-text stationery file to use. People developed interesting sigs with nicely crafted graphic elements. The bandwidth issue was confronted and basic guidelines evolved- all nice but relatively unimportant, until one day someone asked whether anyone had links to Cyberdog resources. No such resource existed. Within 48 hours, a huge resource had emerged from the community without effort or any significant intent to collaborate. It was a Notebook containing hundreds of K of links, and no one person had to do all the work. Here's how it happened.
Notebooks can be dragged into rich-text messages, you see. This one fact, combined with the existing behaviors of drag-and-drop and the ability to squirrel away internet links in all sorts of places with just an easy mouse drag-and-drop, created an environment where this Cyberdog resource _exploded_ into existence. One person, I forget who, answered the request by saying just "I don't have one, but here are some links" and dragging a few related links into a fresh Notebook- and dragging that onto his message and sending it out to the newsgroup. Suddenly everyone had a copy of the Notebook (see any parallels with the Linux 'many eyes make debugging shallow' concept?), and several people added what links _they_ had handy, and dragged their resulting notebooks onto their reply messages, and sent those to the newsgroup. Everyone got those, and several more people pitched in, adding still more links, and one person took all the notebooks and dragged the contents of all onto one notebook, and spent a couple minutes making a folder arrangement to organize the data a bit, and (you guessed it) posted the result to the newsgroup...
The interesting thing about this is not the scope of the resulting data- any one person could put in a few weeks of not-so-hard work and track down all that, or most of it. It's not even the fact that all this happened in days. It's the undeniable fact that all this happened _effortlessly_, it just sort of happened without anyone intending it. Parallel, OSS-like free collaboration over the Net happened _unthinkingly_ because of specific interface features of this particular software, and I was there to see it and recognize what was happening. I'll never forget that. UI can MAKE THINGS HAPPEN, even enable things that won't happen otherwise.
I'm posting this in Netscape. Bill Gates cut a deal with Jobs to endorse IE and kill the Cyberdog/OpenDoc projects. With OpenDoc killed, the companies trying to write parts for it couldn't survive and had to completely redesign their products or die- I don't know how many are left. It's said that one of the reasons OpenDoc was killed was that, despite its flaws (slow and unwieldy and beta-quality) it was a full-on attempt to entirely replace the Office Suite paradigm with a 'building blocks' object oriented paradigm- and Certain People couldn't allow that to happen. Apart from that, it _was_ different though curiously easy to understand and work with- it was always puzzling people until they 'got it', in a flash of intuition, and started to work with the new paradigm instead of against it. You were never in a mode, really- instead of being in 'PowerPoint Mode' you might be drawing a picture or writing a letter and then decide to drag in a movie or something, and suddenly your letter contained Multimedia, without your ever having to run a 'Multimedia App' per se. This freedom was hard for people to get used to- at any moment you could do whatever, and you don't _think_ in terms of that without a bit of enlightenment. What Office user would think of sending someone a chart which, when the recipient looked at it, would show current data live off the Internet- dynamic, in other words? What Outlook Express user would think of sending someone, not a note saying 'Please meet me on server XYZ' but a window containing a telnet link to that server, ready to log in from the message window?
All this existed _years_ ago. It existed in OpenDoc, in Cyberdog, it was all available to the sufficiently ingenious hacker, or indeed to Joe Average half the time (the more spectacular stuff, as always, would require a bit of effort). And it was killed, by Bill Gates and his people- because in many ways it was BETTER than Office- and, perhaps, because it was just too far ahead of its time. Sure, it still used text and radio buttons and pushbuttons and checkboxes- in fact one of the most successful OpenDoc parts ever made _was_ a button, 'Rapid-I Button', that contained its own little interface builder to help people link it to actions and events- but it was so far beyond Office that few people ever made the conceptual jump to realise, "Why couldn't I just have everything available to me all the time, but totally made up of component software so I have complete random access to whatever functionality I want, and never bother with anything I'm not actually using?"
I'd love to see a Slashdot poll on "Do you know what OpenDoc is/was?". There are some areas that are _so_ open to grow into, things which only Linux could do because only Linux is not completely run remotely by Microsoft. Damn it, Cyberdog/OpenDoc _existed_ and it was killed off because Jobs needed to cut a deal with Gates and endorse IE to start Apple's turnaround. I know it worked and am not arguing with Jobs' decision (except to loathe it forever), but it is wrong to allow Microsoft to define computing forever, wrong to allow them to shut off anything that might change the computing paradigm, and I might even suggest it is wrong to mimic them and further proliferate what they have wrought- except that what else is there? Monopoly power works.
Nothing lasts forever, and I can only echo Elvis Costello's bitter lyrics:
Well I hope I don't die too soon, I pray the Lord my soul to save
Oh I'll be a good boy, I'm trying so hard to behave
Because there's one thing I know, I'd like to live long enough to savour
You're exactly right. There are several reasons the Mac is popular with the music crowd...
Expertise, and specialising the machine, pays.If you spend about 2/3 of the effort you spend learning Linux, you can get a Mac to be rock stable for specific audio uses, provided you turn it off when not in use, and don't install MS or AOL software on it.
Legacy and current software: a hell of a lot of software and hardware support for Macs is out there and always has been. There's new commercial stuff like MetaSynth that's strictly Mac- graphical experimental audio synthesis, and I hope to hell they haven't gone and patented it. An old 68K mac still makes a dynamite sequencer for outboard MIDI gear. You'd be surprised at what you can get your hands on just free or from shareware. By the time you're into crippleware you're already seeing stuff like 8-channel digital mixers with both pan control and binaural stereo arrival delay built into each channel- and that's still just shareware stuff, technically.
OS support: the last thing you want is preemptive multitasking. Preemptive multitasking is what makes those squawks and dropouts on Windows CD rips- to the OS it was Very Important to move the mouse at that moment, so important that the audio process had to go pound sand. You never see that on a Mac because instead the mouse just stops responding for a halfsecond, or the keyboard stores up a few letters and catches up when it can (there's an event queue for this allowing you to move faster than the machine is responding). All the while, the _important_ task is still undisturbed. Sure, this sucks donkey ankles when you're talking about watching Netscape render a page- but when you're talking about recording a band's hottest take of a song in a 500$ an hour studio? That's when you don't give a rat's ass whether your window switching happens promptly or if you have to sit there for a sec waiting for it to catch up. It's similar for MIDI- in that case, your music sounds like crap if the note-on signals are not happening _exactly_ when they are supposed to. With rigidly sequenced stuff, it will make it sound less solid- a serious drawback for technoid stuff that's got to sound like a savage machine. For MIDI-recorded performances, it's worse- it will make a musician's performance sound, literally, like they are not as good as they are! Most musicians with a good sense of timing can pick up on this, and it's brutally demoralizing. With a Mac you can get away from that.
I'm not aware of any reason why Linux could not be just as strong for these purposes (except maybe the legacy software, but oh well). You have the source code, it can be changed, and music workstations are often dedicated machines making it very inviting to hack up a specialty Linux that does nothing whatever but the music tasks. Furthermore, I can tell you there's another aspect that might not have been obvious right away- seen VA Linux's new one rack space linux servers? Picture one of those tucked into a rack of audio gear, and you'll begin to see the appeal Linux could have. Picture a specialised digital audio workstation, a FREE one, developed by musician geeks to blow away anything currently available. One that uses a dedicated box, as if it was an embedded application, maybe running off RTLinux or something. Perhaps it doesn't use X, but something more direct that assumes the presence of a particular screen or LCD display. Perhaps it builds synth keyboards and control panels into the OS like they were keyboard and mouse. Perhaps it builds in control of an automated mixing board enabling digital-like control of an analog mix- knobs and servos aren't strictly necessary, there are things like cds cells and optoisolators provided you can control the devices, and they're a lot cheaper. Who knows?
My point is that the sky's the limit, and there's really no reason Linux couldn't end up the obvious choice for something like this. The trick is thinking of it like an embedded application- there's really no point in having the thing serve web pages, and if you're willing to compromise your master tape for the sake of serving some web pages on the same machine or having instant messaging windows pop up, you should stick with doze;)
For those of us who need more dedicated performance, there is still Macintosh (indeed, multiplie macs- I find that I wouldn't trust my powermac to send MIDI sequences and simultaneously record the resulting digital audio from the mixer. But I have a little older mac that can do the sequences as a dedicated box).
For the future? Well, Windows is still going to be consumerland, MOTU is still going strong, Digidesign is still on top of the heap but Opcode is toast, bought and dismantled by Gibson USA. Current Macs suffer somewhat from consumerism- these heavy tasks tend to require lots of slots and terrible demands on a consumerised system, and for a while there Apple had _totally_ blown off pro users, and they could do it again anytime. Not that the old gear doesn't still work, but you can't blindly put your faith in corporations- they can let you down.
Linux might well have a serious future ahead of it in DAW-land, not so much because of any inherent suitability for profoundly pre-emptive multitasking servers to the task (shudder) but simply because it is out there, it's available, it can be turned into whatever you like and it's GPLed and the information is always forthcoming. It's not about linux power, it's about linux empowerment. Ask Opcode users about empowerment sometime now that their vendor has been corporately bought and _thrown_ _away_ stupidly: there will be no bugfixes or access to the source code of Studio Vision. This is what lies in wait for anyone who doesn't control their tools. You have to be able to control your tools or they can be taken from you, held for ransom, or even broken and made useless for no good reason. With Linux, you can own your tools.
"Today, every third Mark made by the megastars' hits goes toward the promotion of young artists."
People are, I hope, fully aware that 'promotion of young artists' means printing of posters and things, the physical pressing of albums, making of cardboard signs that hang in stores, and does not in any way shape or form translate to 'giving the money to young artists'? I don't mention recording costs because the young artists actually stand those costs themselves through advances on royalties. I'm only talking _promotion_ expenses. This doesn't mean artists don't go broke, it means the companies are willing to print up cardboard signs _while_ the artists go broke.
On a happier, more personal yet still vaguely ontopic note- finally got the ADAT and I've hacked the electronics until the thing begins to sound as warm as my open-reel deck- airwindows rides again! And I will still offer free recording to opensource authors willing to release the results as free mp3s. (You'll have to get yourself to Brattleboro Vermont on your own, tho). I hope to have some mind-blowing tracks out soon- still building equipment like mad, hacking the ADAT was more exciting than building the multiband compressor I need for serious mastering:)
Is it so hard to understand there are _two_ problems? By the rules you've laid out, corporations are also obliged to kill people, poison your drinking water and set fire to your _dog_ if there's profit in it and a legal loophole to be had. That's not acceptable. Things are way out of whack when a corporation basically has significantly _more_ rights in practice than a citizen does. At absolute max they should be no more entitled than a human citizen- I myself would like to see them watched more closely and held more responsible than an individual is.
That said, of course you are also right that the patent system is equally screwed. The problem would be improved by work on either end, corporate abuses or patent insanities. I sincerely hope people don't decide to just push for patent reform and let corporations go on, answerable to no law, entities vastly overwhelming the individuals (even those that make up the corporation). On the other hand, I certainly hope nobody guns for the corporations and ignores the patent office!
This is deeply weird. I don't think Microsoft is quite this arrogant, or quite this stupid: anybody could tell them that this is a very dangerous move, particularly if it gets serious press coverage. And yet, they are doing it anyhow.
Why?
My guess is this: Microsoft is hurting for money. (oh, stop laughing! I'm serious!) Microsoft depends on the _perception_ that it has so absurdly much money that it can do or buy anything. Lots of that is 'virtual' money, tied up in stock valuation, and there are also concerns about the accounting procedures used at MS, plus they have expanded so much that they've basically lost the 'start-up' energies that they once had. Apple suffered exactly the same fate in the days of never-shipping Copland and all those neat Apple-funded science projects that Jobs basically threw out. Apple nearly died of it, few people saw them as a dominant force strong enough to make their weak finances insignificant.
In a way it's like Amazon to the Nth power- Amazon doesn't earn money, instead they try to maintain a valuation based on their chances of dominating online bookselling. Microsoft does dominate: does that mean that they earn more than they spend? That's a good question. That is _the_ question to ask as MS continues buying stuff and launching grand huge projects to theoretically maintain their empire. Ask yourself how much, do you think, it cost them to bring Windows Me to its current (dubious) state? For that matter, how much did they spend on the name? Odds are it was some shockingly large sum. The amount of overhead and bureaucracy they have to deal with staggers the mind- _and_ they have piracy to contend with, as in full-on bootleg copying of their wares including all the packaging and stickers, plus the less formal copying that's always been rampant.
People behave as if Microsoft can't possibly be in financial trouble. I think this is a fallacy- particularly now, with no major product expected but Win2K which itself gets a 'wait and see' rating from the Gartner Group. I don't think it's reasonable to assume they can go blithely on for another year without _seriously_ big profit centers from something major and current- and if they are trying to make this profit center out of MCSEs, they are fscking desperate! I say this is blood in the water, and it's not all MCSE blood.
Seriously. If I must support, encourage and use a proprietary media format, it's going to be Quicktime, 100%. Quicktime is absurdly broader and more advanced than this, offers sprites and SMPTE transition effects and panoramas and Star Wars trailers, and all WMP offers is the chance to hand all control of media over to MS who will never give it back. At least Apple plainly doesn't have enough clout to crush and stifle all innovation in the damn industry- they have to compete by actually competing, and when they don't do it well they suffer. MS neither needs to or wants to compete in the capitalist sense people constantly worship them for. I really will suffer just about any loss or hardship to simply deny them further support. Screw video streaming if this is what it's going to be. God knows I'll never see it either on my Mac or the Linux partitions. I am the enemy to them and my role is to be stomped into submission by getting as many media outlets as possible to boycott me. Works both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
And, you know, I'd also really really like the opensource-like benefit of status and appreciation- but ya know it seems like that's going to happen anyhow regardless on account of I don't suck :) "Dog" debuted at 54 (out of over 10,000) on the mp3.com instrumental rock charts! And it's still there and sneaking slowly up the main charts- in fact it's on page two of the instrumental rock chart webpages, and that's from a totally new artist who's never been seen on mp3.com before. "Horse" is also quite good but I think "Dog" is the breakout hit. They're both going to be heard a lot- they're both free- they're both licensed for radio station play, for that matter.
So can I do anything for Geeks In Space? I really like it. I also have this monster studio from hell going, and there are a lot of neat sounds and effects and riffs and things I could give Geeks In Space. Whaddya need?
Ohhhhh, I like this. I like it very much. I would point out that it's much much better to not have the others making threatening (and actionable) remarks at all. Have them just be there in a chillingly disciplined manner, saying nothing.
Ohhhhh, I'd pay to get to do that. Maybe someone should try to organize this :) pity I don't have a black suit. I do have imitation Blues Bros. sunglasses :)
Yet even with all that, I _still_ am beginning to hate uunet more and more. I've taken to adding little personal notes to my customary remarks- like "Please kill this spammer's account, oh UUnet source of my unending torments and target of my everlasting loathing and hatred. -postmaster@airwindows.com" It seems to make no difference and only relieves my feelings a bit. UUnet never stops giving spammers accounts and I'm damned if I can figure out if they even restrict them in the slightest way. I've heard they might do something like give warnings and say 'Send to other emails, ones that don't complain to us!' which is not an acceptable response.
Could _somebody_ please rip uunet's head off and #*$% down their neck? As a personal favor to me and Denor here? :P
My only concern is this: is this a civil case? It might not be an option without a criminal suit. But I really want to see Gates, Ballmer, anyone else responsible for setting the tone of this company, behind bars for however short a time. It is a point that must be made in some way. Hitting them with a pie in the face is just silliness. Hitting them with an Uzi in the face is being LIKE THEM in spirit. That's just wrong. They need to be held accountable for the type of behavior they've forced MS into believing is normal and sanctioned.
- Put all the responsible decision-making execs in jail for an absolute minimum of six months, or at least six weeks. This includes Gates. Hell, being put in jail for six _days_ would be enough to provide a reality check. Anything.
- After the jail time the execs would be barred from working in the computer industry. If it's good enough for Kevin Mitnick... Note, no fines. Who would notice? These are robber barons.
- Microsoft gets found formally guilty of abuse of monopoly power.
- And fined one dollar.
- No more would be necessary.
Seriously. No breakup, no huge fines- all that is needed is to cut off its head (the execs that continue to resist market-owner complacency and bureaucratic internal rot), make it vulnerable to a million class action suits, and allow it to follow the usual course of gradually encroaching irrelevance and out-of-touchness, like the last days of the dinosaurs.The head guys at MS are _crazy_. They are a particular type of crazy that makes it possible to whip a vast organization into action and motivate it with their values. Unfortunately, their values are quite criminal: "win, cheat, don't get caught and if you are, lie". Run this way, the whole company becomes one titanic mugger- but its natural behavior without this continuing drive from above is far lazier and less dangerous. There have been many reports on how Microsoft suffers from the usual bigness syndrome- middle managers building status by _not_ answering their phones to look busier, that sort of corporate idiocy. Dilbertization. You have to have a grudging respect for a upper management that can restrain this tendency at all, through fear and insatiableness and fits of temper when needed- the natural tendency is for MS to get fat and happy and lazy, but the upper mgmt. are CRAZY and will NEVER be satisfied, hence the current situation.
Make MS vulnerable to class action suits by a guilty verdict, and remove the crazy upper management. Jail Gates and co. and block them from working in the industry again. And then leave Microsoft to go its own way, following its own lead, and it will dwindle and be reduced by the market forces it's been trying so hard to avoid all this time.
This is a silly topic to study on, yet I am immensely gratified that someone, somewhere, is willing to just be curious and study it. That curiosity, not the expectation of profitable results, is what science is really about, and it lives. :)
Please, if anyone can flame my data and correct it I beg of you to do so ;) but I'm not a bit surprised that G4s are doing this. Altivec lends itself to big data operations, not just vector processing. Memory moves are faster 128 bits at a time, and so on. Screen blitting, likewise. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if someone is working on an optimized X that uses G4 altivec acceleration- that would seem to be a no-brainer.
McCartney may or may not be taking an active role in this, but in effect he is hurting me, something I do not appreciate. I have not ever downloaded a _single_ thing off 'My Mp3.com' (their commercial-music mirroring service). I _upload_ to mp3.com (links siggified, knowing that slashdot gets royally sick of hearing the same plea 27 times in a row!) and get over 100 megs of web hosting for my music at no charge, in exchange for giving only _nonexclusive_ rights to 'em. McCartney is looking to take this away from me- though I doubt he's even thought it through.
Part of the reason I even picked mp3.com for this, knowing that they are the focal point for these attacks, is because I want to be in a position to take part in a sort of judo-like attack back at the RIAA and these other attackers. If they manage to harm the _original_ part of mp3.com significantly (I really don't care about My Mp3.com) then they are harming me and a _lot_ of other musician types, many of whom take the music mirroring concept a lot more seriously than I do. Can you say 'class action suit'? I knew you could... If these litigous idiots manage to hurt MY ACCESS to media as an independent artist (christ, I'm not even asking for equal time for promotion, or whatever- it's fine if I just sit there on mp3.com having to fend for myself to get publicity- I'm talking about losing access, about building a web presence that gets harmed through a lawsuit to a _separate_ part of the site!) then I will seriously want to be part of a retaliatory lawsuit.
Go ahead and get them to kill the commercial music mirroring, Paul- I can see the argument that this is important and the wave of the future, but it's clearly also a very daring attempt to redefine the law by acting on what it 'should' mean.
But all this defending of the faith is mostly the protecting of a music machine that built _you_, Paul- they have been selling _your_ music for 30 years and more, and have increasingly little interest in making any new 'product'. And maybe you, personally, have had ENOUGH from that work done 30 years ago. You're trying to still be paid to this day from work you did literally before I was born. Record some new songs if you want new money- I personally have no problem with your insisting that every note is commerce and must be bought and paid for- my problem is when your actions begin to step on my ability to have access to media (I'm thinking of the mp3 format in general here, and the mp3.com site in particular as a 'prime location' due to the domain name and size of it).
I hope this all ends up with My Mp3.com either dead or not- but the mp3.com _I_ use still alive. In some ways the mp3.com guy reminds me of Malcolm McLaren, though I know he's not really that clever. If your band can't get a gig- get them arrested. If the band isn't even popular enough to get arrested- get yourself, the manager, arrested! And so he is.
I just hope it stirs up curiosity about what mp3.com used to be- it's incredibly insulting if mp3.com, with tens of thousands of bands and songs of all different quality levels, is treated as just an illegal pirating website for _industry_ music. Putting that spin on it is _amazingly_ insulting.
Well... you've outright said you're not listening to _me_. I've been playing music for almost 20 years, I've paid money to take music business courses and educated myself about the reality of the situation and devoted some hard thought to what's really going on here but I'm coming out for mp3s so you're going to ignore it by default. I've been talking to an LA producer who likes my stuff and ought to be able to get some people listening to it, and _he_ doesn't bat an eyelash at this sort of thing, yet you strike up a noisy bad stance and expect to be taken as the voice of reason.
If you refuse to listen to my 'anecdotal evidence' even though I'm demonstrably a musician who happens to be a /.er, why on earth should I listen to you? I think you're trying to reduce a new situation to a series of easily defeatable strawmen. In doing so you're attacking MY resources. I really, _really_ don't appreciate your trying to kill off the only form of media that remains entirely within my control...
Given that you are not the real Lux Interior of the Cramps, what does the real Lux Interior think about this issue?
Besides which, you're very much in error if you think mp3 pirating gives away your rights. It fails to produce mechanical royalties, is what it does. Nothing about it takes away from your copyright and ownership of the music because no matter how much you give it away that doesn't mean someone else wrote it. You're more likely to lose rights to your music by signing with a major label- read your contract if you ever get one, you won't be able to negotiate any parts of it away and you may well be signing away your copyrights to the label.
Sorry about that, but you didn't really pick the best example. Are you sure the Arvo Part or Harry Partch masters still exist? I _think_ that no Charlie Parker master tapes have ever been destroyed to save a huge record corporation a buck- yet. Give 'em another 20 years and they'll be destroying Miles Davis masters to save costs on storing the tapes. I'm sorry- this is already underway and you cannot save the tapes and the labels will not give up the masters they are destroying- you'd better believe people tried- it's gone on for _years_, there was an expose on this practice in The Absolute Sound v17 issue 80 (published in 1992).
This is _not_ the argument to use to argue that record companies are not inherently evil.
Oh, please, please, mainstream industry, go right ahead and grunge up the audio quality of your CDs with watermark bullshit that 'consumers can't really hear anyway'. Oh, _do_ please encode in copy protection crud all over the music. You're talking to someone who always does fades (as at the end of 'Horse' in analog because digital fades are too grungy. You're talking to someone who's studied the sound engineering trademarks of the greatest selling albums of all time. You have no idea how dangerous such a suggestion really is >:)
Let me put it this way: I work quite hard and devote years of experience to producing a level of sound quality that beats what the major labels, with all their money, can produce. I can do it because technology's gotten lazy in some ways- digital can record subsonics happily but most equipment starts rolling off at maybe 35hz because supposedly people can't 'hear' lower (this in an era that has seen the emergence of thunder-trucks and vans with gigawatts of bass power!). Digital can even produce passably airy and natural highs but most equipment screws this up horribly by killing the almost nonexistent analog-chip hiss of their output stages with horrible ringy ceramic HF-rolloff caps. And in most cases the ultra-expensive studios the industry labels use still suffer from these judgement errors, using equipment _built_ to not give a truly full range.
I can beat the major labels much of the time due to hardware-hacker tricks of this type (and gladly share them). If the major labels take to putting _watermarks_ into all their CDs to interfere with mp3ing- particularly if it's for tracking stuff after it has been mp3ed- then they will be charging $14 for music with a thin, unpleasant haze on the high frequencies- and rather than simply beating their audio quality, I will be able to _maim_ and _stomp_ and _humiliate_ their audio quality, and for free >:)
So please, please, industry, you know the consumer can't hear and won't listen and doesn't care- put watermarks into all the CDs! ;) It won't hurt anything to lower the sound quality just a little bit- not like there is anybody out there _competing_ with you or anything ;) go ahead! You can even charge a little more because it is 'secure' ;) that's the ticket!
Please, industry, just a _bit_ more arrogance and contempt! You're not dying fast enough and I would greatly appreciate it if you make it even _easier_ for just me and my equipment to compete directly with you ;)
Anybody reading this, if you'd like airwindows to do a digital mastering job for you (ADAT 20 or 16 bit, 1/4" tape 7.5 or 15 ips, cassette or vinyl transfers), write chrisj@airwindows.com and say you saw it on slashdot and I'll digitally master your material for _free_. You will need to either travel to Vermont or pay shipping for your master tapes to get here and back. Hear what your music sounds like mastered through a custom board and handmade cabling capable of subsonic to supersonic signal carrying, with EQs to control it perfectly! All playback devices (ADAT, reel to reel _and_ even tape cassette) specially customised to give significantly wider range than anything you can buy off the shelf!
(Yes, I'm serious! This industry jihad is pissing me off ;) I happen to be able to afford to earn nothing at all from my sound engineering, for the moment, just to be able to insult the mainstream industry. If any of you ever wanted a professional mastering job done, talk to me and we'll work something out. You _don't_ have to be signed to a major label to have access to professional recording or mastering quality.)
"Why would anybody sit down and write a novel if it's going to be pirated for free the first day it's released?"
Ye gods. You'd better ask Emily Dickinson that, my friend. In fact, you don't have to (she's dead and still more lastingly popular than you could hope to be)- you can ask me. I have written a novel and put it up on the net to be 'pirated for free'. Ask _me_.
I'll tell you why: the story needed to be told. As it grew I eventually realised I was telling a story, also, about how the world seemed to me at the time- without intending it, the fiction and invention became a kind of communication. It became a means of self expression- and also an exercise in the joy of sheer craftmanship. I once told somebody I met in a bookstore about how I wrote the ending to Kings Of Rainmoor, and how through a series of twist endings and unexpected but inevitable surprises I ended it in a very artistic and appropriate way- and she was most impressed, and got some of the sense of _rightness_ I feel about that ending. And that sense is what writing the book was _for_... I created something that has power and beauty to me (and to other people, too.)
It's the same with my MP3 songs and MP3 instrumentals. Let's look at the latter for a second. I'm in the process of doing an album on animal themes, and I had some music in my head that gave a very romantic sense of what a Horse is (we're talking teenage girl obsessiveness levels of romanticism ;) ). I could hear it, could feel it wanting to exist- and through a lot of work and the application of skills I've spent a lot of years learning, I got it on tape- it's at the 'MP3 instrumentals' link above, named "Horse", naturally. I ran about trying to tell people it was there, too, because it's one of the finest bits of art I've ever done. I ran across a person on a MUCK who was a big horse lover (or, rather, a unicorn fancier) and he listened to it- and was blown away! And that validated all the effort I'd put in- because in part musical art is the fiction of imagining stuff and playing it, but it is also communication, and I was able to communicate to another person the almost mystical romanticism I was trying to express in pure _sound_. That's fscking magic, to be able to do that. It's addictive. Who the hell needs to get money to justify being able to wreak magic? I wonder if these 'artists' who don't understand this are even able to come up with even scant milliamps of magic. That seems simply pathetic to me- I know what I want and we're not even speaking the same language, it seems. When I get things set up right, work really hard, maybe bleed or get a few blisters from strenuous playing or drumming, and find the right listener (because there's always a right listener), I get to produce whole _amps_ of magic, I get to every now and then hit people with a charge of music like a lightning bolt and _stun_ them with art. I hardly exaggerate to say that I live for that- certainly I know musicians who can stun _me_ in turn. The Pixies, Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits have all managed to stun me one way or another with music (Beefheart is the man who said, "I'd like to give my music away because where I got it, you didn't have to pay for it"!). From the slush piles of mp3.com I've also found the same charge- there's this band Creeper Lagoon- most of their stuff didn't hit me so hard but this one song, "Drop Your Head" stunned me. And there it is- it's the visceral response to art, to music.
Reading Puff Daddy's take on the matter is even more ludicrous than reading the pop music hacks' take on it. Are we or are we not talking about a rapper who takes complete works of music by somebody else, grabs some loops out of the song, basically using those MUSICIANS' best notes for nothing, _talks_ over them (shouts? rants?) and thinks _he_ is guaranteed income from this? That's fscking ludicrous. Look, I have that MP3 instrumentals area. Some of it, particularly the albumlength workout 'Extended Play' (which has been compared to 'really good Yes, or King Crimson') is absolutely _begging_ to have bits of it looped and used as a more rock-derived rap backing, a more snarling distorted driving beat. It's wide-range, it's fierce, it's just waiting to be sampled. I'd like to see Puff Daddy go raid _my_ music, grab notes that I sweated over and got blisters over, do some rap over them and then claim _he_ is entitled to money for it. How much time does he spend compared to how much time and effort I spend on the source for those 'fair use' loops?
And yet I'm not arguing that he shouldn't be able to do that- I'm arguing that he doesn't have special rights to money on that basis. If he finds people who want to watch him rap in person to my music as a backing loop, I for one will not bitch. If people want to buy physical media from him on that basis, I'll let it pass and will cheerfully allow him to not give me a dime for it. If he thinks he's _entitled_ to payment just for having done this, then I would have to ask whether I was _entitled_ to payment in turn for supplying those theoretical loops.
The logical conclusion is this: these frustrated pop business majors are _obligated_ to stop attempting to record music, because they can't guarantee that they are paid for every playing of a note (many use session men so they are trying to guarantee that they are paid for the playing of _someone_ _else's_ note). For the rap artists who feel this way, they are obligated to try and be paid for every word. Since rap is music of the streets and is taken from life and performed by people who live what they rap, the rap artists are logically obligated to try and be paid for every word they ever utter, and need to walk about with a big sack (and, presumably, a gun) speaking to people and taking money from them in payment for their rap performances. Since this is certifiably insane behavior, they will then get locked up and the rest of us can go on with our lives :)
Including me, finishing this post and signing it with the URLs where I give my art to my listeners:
http://www.mp3.com/RFW (radio-type songs)
http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ (instrumentals)
http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ is the place you can find mp3s produced in my new studio- if you download only one track make it "Horse", though "Whale" is also recorded in the new studio. I flat out defy anyone to match that recording quality with anything short of a insanely expensive and sophisticated full recording studio. I am a sound engineer geek, this is my thing- and an open source geek, so I am _ready_ to provide that proper recording studio to other people like me. I just finished talking to an independent LA producer on a MUCK for whom I'm going to make guitar and bass samples- in return he'll get some more people listening to my art, which is all I'm asking of a person in his position. It's barter, and it's networking, and it works. And here I am- to most comers (where I'm doing it out of commerce not love) I'm billing $75 an hour for studio time which includes me in there doing everything up to production, studio musician, cheerleader and psychologist ;) I have had good results enticing and conning great performances out of musicians, such as getting a keyboard player to play more solid bass-keyboard parts by showing him what just bass+drums sound like (he cut the part way back- his tape ended up grooving like mad!) or getting a classical guitarist to transition mentally from a baroque piece to a flamenco piece ("No, the slightly muted note was _okay_... relax, let's put some _garlic_ on this performance! Get right into it, you're not playing Baroque this time").
And again, I may be out of my depth for promotion and advertising, I may not be equipped to manufacture CDs, I may not be interested in judging music crap (I have found that you can bring music out of just about anybody if you're a good producer, so nobody is 'crap', they are mostly just badly handled), but I'm raising my hand to be counted as part of the 'new structure arising' to provide what people think you need major labels for.
Because you don't need major labels for that. Period. >:)
It's all very well giving the Spice Girls $10, or Goo Goo Dolls, but the reason you know to download their mp3s is that you have _heard_ them. How about giving some of the netizens a bit of the time and attention that's normally shoved down your throat by the labels' starmaking machinery? How about every Slashdot reader musician who reads this, follow up to this post with the information where to download your music and a pointer to whatever it is you want to highlight.
I'll kick it off with great seriousness as just today I released a track on mp3.com which I'm real proud of. Spent days on it and even rebuilt some of my equipment to produce this music. It's got a real 'old Pink Floyd' vibe to it and exemplifies what I myself want to see in 'non-industry-machine' music. It's for an 'animal themes' album, and is called "Horse", and is probably the single most different thing you could be listening to right now, plus it's _very_ high audio quality thanks entirely to geek ingenuity and willingness to tinker with the equipment ;)
It is at http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ and dammit, I don't even care about who gets the 10$: I don't _make_ music to get money (if I want that, I can record people using world-class sound engineering skills and charge them, legitimately, for the service of putting my skills at their disposal). I make music to be listened to, and because I must, because I hear it in my dreams and because it moves my hands and feet when I'm not paying attention and because it makes me live. I don't want money for it- I want it to be heard!
For radio fans there are many song-type songs at http://www.mp3.com/RFW. I wouldn't want to underplay those even if my geek nature likes "Horse" best at the moment because of its sonic characteristics :)
Who else of the slashdot readers creates music and wants a chance at a listening? Post a reply and I promise that I for one will go listen to every musician who posts a URL :) and for those of you who aren't musicians, the sick thing is that while you're talking about sending 10$ to the artist, most acts on a place like mp3.com do not even get ONE listen, at all. So anyone who follows up can be pleased in the knowledge that I at least will give them a listen, thus jumping them over 50% of the other acts in the ratings :)
HELL YES, I'd like to be listened to! I'm a damn musician! I've been playing for almost TWENTY years, and write good songs and think of interesting musical experiments for instrumentals, and 'musician Matt Rose' speaks for me bigtime.
In fact, you know what? Currently I do not have ANY way in place for listeners to pay me. There's no CD yet. No T-Shirts ;) wups, sorry! I guess you'll just have to listen to my art FOR FREE. I guess you'll have to shake off the assumptions pounded into your head by a culture industry, that nothing's good unless it costs money and has the little alligator logo on it or says Ralph Lauren or Pokemon or Spice Girls on it, and you'll have to go download years of artistic work for FREE with my BLESSING because, slashdot geek-type open source people, that is what I want to do with it. Is that so hard to understand to opensource types? Isn't it kind of similar to the free software spirit? And, in fact, I also write some computer software- and GPL it. I'm not some random musician hitting Slashdot to hype- I post here all the time, my user page says Chris Johnson (580)! And I also compose music- a lot of it- and dearly wish for it to be heard. When I come out with political geek-oriented music (two songs in the works already, "Blue Collar Computer Technician Man" and "Options Vesting Party", the first is a heavy blues and the second insists on being country for some reason :) ) I want people to be listening.
So, please do? Some of you broadband folks, general music enjoyers, anyone, everyone? I have songs up at http://www.mp3.com/RFW which stands for The Room Full Of Windows, the 'song project' which will get the geek songs when I record them. I'll make recommendations too as there are a lot of songs there: If you like mean blues in the BOFH spirit, listen to "Staring Down The Phone". If you like sad pretty harmonies, "Just Another Someone Turned Away". If you want maximum angst done well, "December" is for you (or maybe it _is_ you ;) it was me at the time!) If you like a more upbeat rock check out "Stupid Faith In You". I got up to some Who-esque walls of guitar chords in "Color Me Gone" which is also upbeat and grooves really nicely. Finally, my personal favorite would be "The Rules"- it's sweet but intelligent and has a lot of humor in it, and sums up my geek outlook on life :)
Then I also have instrumental music up at http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ. This is a bit sparser- contains a reggae lead guitar workout, "Variations On A Sicilian Poodle", a very long-play rock jam segmented into three parts to fit on mp3.com, "Extended Play" (think of it as like the rock version of techno background hacking music, also it is very high audio quality especially bass) and the first 'anima' track, "Whale" which is also the first track from my new studio which I'll record geeks in for free if they can journey here at their own expense (I can't be paying airfare :) ) These instrumentals, especially "Extended Play" and "Variations On A Sicilian Poodle" also work as killer audio test records, even in mp3 form- especially into the bass, I have a heavily custom board and the bass on these extends waaaaaay down into subwoofer territory, use it to show off your audio gear. iMac transparent subwoofers need not apply ;)
Gah- now there's no time to lay down the drum track, I have to go return a CD-Rom burner! I'm not sorry *g* slashdot's a net-home for me and I gladly blow off audio work until later to communicate with my people :) I'll get to it later. But for god's sake, man- go listen to the free music! Get a fellow geek on the mp3.com charts. It's the only way you can give me anything for the years of work I put in, 'cos I have NOTHING to sell you. Everybody always says 'Oh, I will give the artist $5 to encourage them!' but I got no CD to sell at the moment so even if you love the music you can't give me money for it. So go download it again or tell somebody about the geek opensource-writing hardware-hacking crazy musician who wants to be heard. Maybe CmdrTaco would like me to record some free musical bits for Geeks In Space! I've listened to every GIS, it would be fun to give it some music that wasn't 303-music :)
Gotta run! go take free music from me! these super army tanks are free and get 200 mpg and I'll come over and remix them while you sleep! (get away from me you freak! Don't you know everybody listens to station wagons?) ;)
I think they are indeed panicing/desperate, and I'll go on record as saying, this early, that they are financially overextended (yes they had a lot of money, but a Microsoft can also BURN a hell of a lot of money in half-assed projects and featherbedding) which sets them up for one hell of a crash. Not a 'panicky investor crash', I'm talking a 'investigation reveals MS actually is 75 grand in the red and can't make its payroll' kind of crash (in general terms, not that specific headline): a situation where everything's covered up until the last possible minute, nobody will believe a word of it, until the story eventually breaks causing _major_ shock and astonishment. Again, the essence of the story would be simply that MS spends more than it makes, and that this eventually _will_ matter.
Might the mechanics of breakup perhaps reveal some of this? It would be very funny in a cruel way- rather than MS trying to hold out and conceal secret wealth and power, MS could be trying like hell to conceal secret _rot_, secret debt and the _real_ balance sheet.
What do they really have? I wouldn't say 'Office and the development tools'- I'd say, what do they really have besides the reputation of absolutely unchallengable wealth and influence? What would happen if Microsoft was to say 'We can't afford that'? The idea seems unthinkable- well, I'm thinking it. Again, how much is X-Box costing them? How much did W2K cost them, how much did the consumer W2K cost before it was abandoned and switched over to Windows Me? How much is _that_ costing them?
That said, this still reduces to an absurd situation where you can't put 'Coke' in any domains, subdomains, etc etc without being hassled. What's needed is some good solid rulings in court saying "Grabbing and holding the .com is ENOUGH! You don't have to hassle everyone on the planet. If 'coke' means 'small purple fish' in Zabongahelian, well then "coke.zb" can go on meaning a fish restaraunt's web presence WITHOUT weakening Coca-Cola's trademark claim- because they hold the .com and are doing business using that as a trademark in many countries.
It's the fear of the unknown: "Does coke.zb mean that we lose our trademark all over the world? *quake, tremble*" that causes the abuses. You have to immunize these big companies from their fears of losing what they're entitled to. They have a perfect right to own the name 'Coke' as applied to beverages. They've a right to be scared if they think they could end up losing that. They need some clear rules formally making them safe from the threat of losing all their trademark stuff just for not hassling domain holders in Zabongahelia. Without such assurance, they are compelled to really be destructive and draconian, because it's out of fear and nobody can tell them they _won't_ lose their important trademarks over such a thing.
Personally, I went with web publishing through impatience with the normal routine. First agent I tried (totally 'cold calling') was the Maas Agency. Struck out (have since learned that it was insanity to even attempt them, but it was fun). Second agent I tried bit, and asked for the rest of "The Kings Of Rainmoor" to read. I sat for months, in an agony of uncertainty, knowing that the guy _had_ expressed an interest- and finally, politely, he passed, citing a big workload.
There was no third try. I plead a low tolerance for sitting around in an agony of uncertainty. I don't write to be _not_ read.
This whole novel, and many other things, are there to be read by anyone, at http://www.airwindows.com/fiction/inde x.html
For that matter, I don't play music to be not listened to: as of a few days ago I have most of my song catalog up at http://www.mp3.com/RFW, and I'm working on getting instrumental stuff up at http://www.mp3.com/chrisj (currently not online as the songs have just been uploaded)
With all of this, my motives are a lot like OSS coders in some ways. I can do these things. They are entertainment things. Where is it written that I have to withhold them and extort money off them and all that rot? I get by- I may never, ever, own a house or something like that, but I don't starve and I have a place to stay. What I would like most of all is to be IN PEOPLE'S FACES making art and GIVING it away. If you want to get picky, I'm expecting to be able to sell _studio_ time and my talents as a sound engineer- and even then, as I've said before, I'll work for open source types who are willing to release the result freely as mp3 for nothing! (_they_ pay cabfare to Brattleboro Vermont, tho)
The era we're starting to enter has some very interesting qualities. It allows pretty much global networking of talents, and the only downside is that you don't just hear about the 'slush pile'- you're soaking in it! But by the same token, word can get out about one of the ten percenters really quick. I know I work pretty hard to be one of those ten percenters- though there are areas, still (like C coding) where I just lose :)
In a way that's why I am so committed to the mp3 revolution that I've put out basically _everything_ as mp3 with no attempt to get money off it. I want people to see that you can do that- it's like OSS coding, people eventually had to _see_ that you could work together giving your code away and that it was all right and even beneficial. I want OSS for artists. I want to show that the qualities for artistic success are talent and hard work- not greed and marketing. I don't know if that'll happen, but it's not for lack of trying- and I have nothing to lose, I can survive even in total obscurity, and in fact I needn't even pay for the 100 megs of broadband web hosting required to store my current mp3 catalog- because I give it to mp3.com, too, and they have nonexclusive rights to it. So even if I get nothing else, my willingness to give out this stuff freely gets me web hosting that would cost me a hundred bucks a month from my current provider. (It gets me no promo, of course- it's all one big slush pile.)
(you and me both, Cap'n.)- read his books, at least Tog On Interface
- THINK. What does all this mean? Why was he testing on smart, clued people who'd never seen a computer before? Is this really 'design for idiots' or is it actually 'finding what conclusions are typically drawn by an untutored user'?
- USE it.
I'd like to see more X apps use Mac/Win mouse text selection behavior, particularly Mac type drag and drop of selections with the little visual cues to what's happening. Not because this is 'like what I already know': I'm equally willing to learn other rules, but Tog-ized text selection behavior is just better thought out, and quicker to understand, due to smart assumptions about what happens when you do things.This is a way Tog can help immensely without even paying attention directly. I wonder, if the wish is for Tog to actively help out with UI, what is he expected to do? "Help make three-button X text handling more intuitive!" "Help make our Excel-type button bar more intuitive!" Sometimes the answer is "You can't."
I've personally had experience with advanced UI and seen what happens. It was a couple years ago, and I began using the now-abandoned-by-MS-pressure Apple internet suite, 'Cyberdog'. This was revolutionary in several ways- it was massively object-oriented, using OpenDoc (and many parts were released for it, too- few _containers_ tho) but what I am referring to is specifically the interface aspects of it, and what they meant.
Cyberdog let you abstract all sorts of internet resources into an iconlike object. Email addresses would, when doubleclicked, make a 'To:' email to the address, or could be dragged into text or a header field and write the required text- basically everytime you did something that seemed plausible, it did what you wanted. FTP site addresses could open on the desktop like a Finder window to a remote site, or could be dragged to browser windows etc etc. Web bookmarks, likewise- telnet never quite got debugged but tried to open a terminal window- and all of these could exist as a simple bookmark file anywhere on your HD, complete with distinctive icon- or it could be dragged into a container object, the Notebook, a yellow-lined window with a sort of tree-view structure where you could store _lots_ of these references, or indeed aliases to anything else on your HD you wanted.
The Notebook container could also be used as an object- and this is where the user interface started to become unexpectedly powerful.
You _could_ convince notebooks to hold links to other notebooks- but this isn't what I mean, it's more of a top-level organizing tool. Go back with me to the peak of Cyberdog community- people were interacting on a special Apple Usenet server where you could post binaries, including Cyberdog rich text. What that meant was this: you could drag images etc. into your message and they'd be displayed inline. You could make a rich-text stationery file to use. People developed interesting sigs with nicely crafted graphic elements. The bandwidth issue was confronted and basic guidelines evolved- all nice but relatively unimportant, until one day someone asked whether anyone had links to Cyberdog resources. No such resource existed. Within 48 hours, a huge resource had emerged from the community without effort or any significant intent to collaborate. It was a Notebook containing hundreds of K of links, and no one person had to do all the work. Here's how it happened.
Notebooks can be dragged into rich-text messages, you see. This one fact, combined with the existing behaviors of drag-and-drop and the ability to squirrel away internet links in all sorts of places with just an easy mouse drag-and-drop, created an environment where this Cyberdog resource _exploded_ into existence. One person, I forget who, answered the request by saying just "I don't have one, but here are some links" and dragging a few related links into a fresh Notebook- and dragging that onto his message and sending it out to the newsgroup. Suddenly everyone had a copy of the Notebook (see any parallels with the Linux 'many eyes make debugging shallow' concept?), and several people added what links _they_ had handy, and dragged their resulting notebooks onto their reply messages, and sent those to the newsgroup. Everyone got those, and several more people pitched in, adding still more links, and one person took all the notebooks and dragged the contents of all onto one notebook, and spent a couple minutes making a folder arrangement to organize the data a bit, and (you guessed it) posted the result to the newsgroup...
The interesting thing about this is not the scope of the resulting data- any one person could put in a few weeks of not-so-hard work and track down all that, or most of it. It's not even the fact that all this happened in days. It's the undeniable fact that all this happened _effortlessly_, it just sort of happened without anyone intending it. Parallel, OSS-like free collaboration over the Net happened _unthinkingly_ because of specific interface features of this particular software, and I was there to see it and recognize what was happening. I'll never forget that. UI can MAKE THINGS HAPPEN, even enable things that won't happen otherwise.
I'm posting this in Netscape. Bill Gates cut a deal with Jobs to endorse IE and kill the Cyberdog/OpenDoc projects. With OpenDoc killed, the companies trying to write parts for it couldn't survive and had to completely redesign their products or die- I don't know how many are left. It's said that one of the reasons OpenDoc was killed was that, despite its flaws (slow and unwieldy and beta-quality) it was a full-on attempt to entirely replace the Office Suite paradigm with a 'building blocks' object oriented paradigm- and Certain People couldn't allow that to happen. Apart from that, it _was_ different though curiously easy to understand and work with- it was always puzzling people until they 'got it', in a flash of intuition, and started to work with the new paradigm instead of against it. You were never in a mode, really- instead of being in 'PowerPoint Mode' you might be drawing a picture or writing a letter and then decide to drag in a movie or something, and suddenly your letter contained Multimedia, without your ever having to run a 'Multimedia App' per se. This freedom was hard for people to get used to- at any moment you could do whatever, and you don't _think_ in terms of that without a bit of enlightenment. What Office user would think of sending someone a chart which, when the recipient looked at it, would show current data live off the Internet- dynamic, in other words? What Outlook Express user would think of sending someone, not a note saying 'Please meet me on server XYZ' but a window containing a telnet link to that server, ready to log in from the message window?
All this existed _years_ ago. It existed in OpenDoc, in Cyberdog, it was all available to the sufficiently ingenious hacker, or indeed to Joe Average half the time (the more spectacular stuff, as always, would require a bit of effort). And it was killed, by Bill Gates and his people- because in many ways it was BETTER than Office- and, perhaps, because it was just too far ahead of its time. Sure, it still used text and radio buttons and pushbuttons and checkboxes- in fact one of the most successful OpenDoc parts ever made _was_ a button, 'Rapid-I Button', that contained its own little interface builder to help people link it to actions and events- but it was so far beyond Office that few people ever made the conceptual jump to realise, "Why couldn't I just have everything available to me all the time, but totally made up of component software so I have complete random access to whatever functionality I want, and never bother with anything I'm not actually using?"
I'd love to see a Slashdot poll on "Do you know what OpenDoc is/was?". There are some areas that are _so_ open to grow into, things which only Linux could do because only Linux is not completely run remotely by Microsoft. Damn it, Cyberdog/OpenDoc _existed_ and it was killed off because Jobs needed to cut a deal with Gates and endorse IE to start Apple's turnaround. I know it worked and am not arguing with Jobs' decision (except to loathe it forever), but it is wrong to allow Microsoft to define computing forever, wrong to allow them to shut off anything that might change the computing paradigm, and I might even suggest it is wrong to mimic them and further proliferate what they have wrought- except that what else is there? Monopoly power works.
Nothing lasts forever, and I can only echo Elvis Costello's bitter lyrics:
Expertise, and specialising the machine, pays.If you spend about 2/3 of the effort you spend learning Linux, you can get a Mac to be rock stable for specific audio uses, provided you turn it off when not in use, and don't install MS or AOL software on it.
Legacy and current software: a hell of a lot of software and hardware support for Macs is out there and always has been. There's new commercial stuff like MetaSynth that's strictly Mac- graphical experimental audio synthesis, and I hope to hell they haven't gone and patented it. An old 68K mac still makes a dynamite sequencer for outboard MIDI gear. You'd be surprised at what you can get your hands on just free or from shareware. By the time you're into crippleware you're already seeing stuff like 8-channel digital mixers with both pan control and binaural stereo arrival delay built into each channel- and that's still just shareware stuff, technically.
OS support: the last thing you want is preemptive multitasking. Preemptive multitasking is what makes those squawks and dropouts on Windows CD rips- to the OS it was Very Important to move the mouse at that moment, so important that the audio process had to go pound sand. You never see that on a Mac because instead the mouse just stops responding for a halfsecond, or the keyboard stores up a few letters and catches up when it can (there's an event queue for this allowing you to move faster than the machine is responding). All the while, the _important_ task is still undisturbed. Sure, this sucks donkey ankles when you're talking about watching Netscape render a page- but when you're talking about recording a band's hottest take of a song in a 500$ an hour studio? That's when you don't give a rat's ass whether your window switching happens promptly or if you have to sit there for a sec waiting for it to catch up. It's similar for MIDI- in that case, your music sounds like crap if the note-on signals are not happening _exactly_ when they are supposed to. With rigidly sequenced stuff, it will make it sound less solid- a serious drawback for technoid stuff that's got to sound like a savage machine. For MIDI-recorded performances, it's worse- it will make a musician's performance sound, literally, like they are not as good as they are! Most musicians with a good sense of timing can pick up on this, and it's brutally demoralizing. With a Mac you can get away from that.
I'm not aware of any reason why Linux could not be just as strong for these purposes (except maybe the legacy software, but oh well). You have the source code, it can be changed, and music workstations are often dedicated machines making it very inviting to hack up a specialty Linux that does nothing whatever but the music tasks. Furthermore, I can tell you there's another aspect that might not have been obvious right away- seen VA Linux's new one rack space linux servers? Picture one of those tucked into a rack of audio gear, and you'll begin to see the appeal Linux could have. Picture a specialised digital audio workstation, a FREE one, developed by musician geeks to blow away anything currently available. One that uses a dedicated box, as if it was an embedded application, maybe running off RTLinux or something. Perhaps it doesn't use X, but something more direct that assumes the presence of a particular screen or LCD display. Perhaps it builds synth keyboards and control panels into the OS like they were keyboard and mouse. Perhaps it builds in control of an automated mixing board enabling digital-like control of an analog mix- knobs and servos aren't strictly necessary, there are things like cds cells and optoisolators provided you can control the devices, and they're a lot cheaper. Who knows?
My point is that the sky's the limit, and there's really no reason Linux couldn't end up the obvious choice for something like this. The trick is thinking of it like an embedded application- there's really no point in having the thing serve web pages, and if you're willing to compromise your master tape for the sake of serving some web pages on the same machine or having instant messaging windows pop up, you should stick with doze ;)
For those of us who need more dedicated performance, there is still Macintosh (indeed, multiplie macs- I find that I wouldn't trust my powermac to send MIDI sequences and simultaneously record the resulting digital audio from the mixer. But I have a little older mac that can do the sequences as a dedicated box).
For the future? Well, Windows is still going to be consumerland, MOTU is still going strong, Digidesign is still on top of the heap but Opcode is toast, bought and dismantled by Gibson USA. Current Macs suffer somewhat from consumerism- these heavy tasks tend to require lots of slots and terrible demands on a consumerised system, and for a while there Apple had _totally_ blown off pro users, and they could do it again anytime. Not that the old gear doesn't still work, but you can't blindly put your faith in corporations- they can let you down.
Linux might well have a serious future ahead of it in DAW-land, not so much because of any inherent suitability for profoundly pre-emptive multitasking servers to the task (shudder) but simply because it is out there, it's available, it can be turned into whatever you like and it's GPLed and the information is always forthcoming. It's not about linux power, it's about linux empowerment. Ask Opcode users about empowerment sometime now that their vendor has been corporately bought and _thrown_ _away_ stupidly: there will be no bugfixes or access to the source code of Studio Vision. This is what lies in wait for anyone who doesn't control their tools. You have to be able to control your tools or they can be taken from you, held for ransom, or even broken and made useless for no good reason. With Linux, you can own your tools.
People are, I hope, fully aware that 'promotion of young artists' means printing of posters and things, the physical pressing of albums, making of cardboard signs that hang in stores, and does not in any way shape or form translate to 'giving the money to young artists'? I don't mention recording costs because the young artists actually stand those costs themselves through advances on royalties. I'm only talking _promotion_ expenses. This doesn't mean artists don't go broke, it means the companies are willing to print up cardboard signs _while_ the artists go broke.
On a happier, more personal yet still vaguely ontopic note- finally got the ADAT and I've hacked the electronics until the thing begins to sound as warm as my open-reel deck- airwindows rides again! And I will still offer free recording to opensource authors willing to release the results as free mp3s. (You'll have to get yourself to Brattleboro Vermont on your own, tho). I hope to have some mind-blowing tracks out soon- still building equipment like mad, hacking the ADAT was more exciting than building the multiband compressor I need for serious mastering :)
That said, of course you are also right that the patent system is equally screwed. The problem would be improved by work on either end, corporate abuses or patent insanities. I sincerely hope people don't decide to just push for patent reform and let corporations go on, answerable to no law, entities vastly overwhelming the individuals (even those that make up the corporation). On the other hand, I certainly hope nobody guns for the corporations and ignores the patent office!
Why?
My guess is this: Microsoft is hurting for money. (oh, stop laughing! I'm serious!) Microsoft depends on the _perception_ that it has so absurdly much money that it can do or buy anything. Lots of that is 'virtual' money, tied up in stock valuation, and there are also concerns about the accounting procedures used at MS, plus they have expanded so much that they've basically lost the 'start-up' energies that they once had. Apple suffered exactly the same fate in the days of never-shipping Copland and all those neat Apple-funded science projects that Jobs basically threw out. Apple nearly died of it, few people saw them as a dominant force strong enough to make their weak finances insignificant.
In a way it's like Amazon to the Nth power- Amazon doesn't earn money, instead they try to maintain a valuation based on their chances of dominating online bookselling. Microsoft does dominate: does that mean that they earn more than they spend? That's a good question. That is _the_ question to ask as MS continues buying stuff and launching grand huge projects to theoretically maintain their empire. Ask yourself how much, do you think, it cost them to bring Windows Me to its current (dubious) state? For that matter, how much did they spend on the name? Odds are it was some shockingly large sum. The amount of overhead and bureaucracy they have to deal with staggers the mind- _and_ they have piracy to contend with, as in full-on bootleg copying of their wares including all the packaging and stickers, plus the less formal copying that's always been rampant.
People behave as if Microsoft can't possibly be in financial trouble. I think this is a fallacy- particularly now, with no major product expected but Win2K which itself gets a 'wait and see' rating from the Gartner Group. I don't think it's reasonable to assume they can go blithely on for another year without _seriously_ big profit centers from something major and current- and if they are trying to make this profit center out of MCSEs, they are fscking desperate! I say this is blood in the water, and it's not all MCSE blood.
Seriously. If I must support, encourage and use a proprietary media format, it's going to be Quicktime, 100%. Quicktime is absurdly broader and more advanced than this, offers sprites and SMPTE transition effects and panoramas and Star Wars trailers, and all WMP offers is the chance to hand all control of media over to MS who will never give it back. At least Apple plainly doesn't have enough clout to crush and stifle all innovation in the damn industry- they have to compete by actually competing, and when they don't do it well they suffer. MS neither needs to or wants to compete in the capitalist sense people constantly worship them for. I really will suffer just about any loss or hardship to simply deny them further support. Screw video streaming if this is what it's going to be. God knows I'll never see it either on my Mac or the Linux partitions. I am the enemy to them and my role is to be stomped into submission by getting as many media outlets as possible to boycott me. Works both ways.