The point is not to prevent copying. It is to destroy the movie rental business, or at least give the studios a much larger take. It's another "magic bullet" that the large studios have been looking for to bring in to eliminate the annoying rental houses that detract from their profits.
The nifty fringe benefit may be to eventually destroy the "fair use" argument used by those defending cracking of their security algorithms. If you defeat the protection on the disc (using one or more of the techniques already discussed here), you were only licensed it for 48 hours -- you have no fair use rights beyond that time limit. Ditto for duping a copy to your hard disc. Yeah, rip all you like for 48 hours, but if you're prosecuted, you have zero rights to that media after that time window expires.
I'm concerned about the recyclability factor, but not so much about the introduction of the media. From where I sit, it will probably play out a lot like phone cards. Yeah, there's a certain segment of the population that uses disposable phone cards rabidly. There are others that use them on an as-needed basis, and still others (like myself) that have never used a disposable phone card and never intend to. The studios know that people like to watch movies once a year or whatever, and they'd be stupid to ignore that segment of the population.
And if it doesn't drive the price of real DVD's up, why should I care? I'm not a huge fan of the MPAA or RIAA, but neither am I averse to rewarding them for publicizing quality entertainment that I really enjoy. The release of Evanescence's album, "Fallen", has me totally spellbound right now. And I'm really not the kind of person to normally listen to an album over and over...
Anyway, that's a tangent. There are a lot of "stick it to the MP/RIAA"-types here on Slashdot, and for them the self-destructing, cheap DVDs will be a boon. For those of us who feel a desire to reward artists legitimately for the enjoyment we get from their craft, we'll still have all the old options left...
Re:Firebird - Mozilla Browser confusion
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Mozilla's Joy Of Naming
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· Score: 3, Informative
The quick sum-up on naming:
Until the 1.4 final release, the lightweight browser and mail components are referred to, respectively, as "Mozilla Firebird" and "Mozilla Thunderbird"
Post-1.4 release, the lightweight components will become the mainstream browser and mail components, referred to as "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla Mail".
The gal getting all worked up about naming is kind of barking up the wrong tree. Yeah, that's the project's name for the time being. However, Firebird will fall out of regular use here within the next few months...
I concur. The only times I feel the age of my 933MHz Pentium III is on certain levels in Unreal Tournament, and when I'm compiling a new kernel and realize it takes three times longer than the newest benchmarks.
The 970 looks exciting, but I personally am anticipating the release only for the dramatic price reduction it should bring in the older Macs. At that point, I'll go get that Powerbook -- once I can pick up a decent one for less than $2,000.
I think what the robotics world is trying to accomplish is that in the animal world you have everything from flatworms or insects with very hard-wired kinds of behaviors to humans with very complex brains and reasoning. Classic AI is approaching things from the human end while the robot swarm is approaching things from the lower organisms.
I would maintain that human beings are responding in a hard-wired way as well. It's a matter of scale.
The rough thing to figure out about people is our curious ability to change ourselves. In lower organisms, they behave in exceptionally predictable ways. Even they can be trained, but reaction to higher-level stimuli is beyond their power. Yet humans can and will change their own thoughts in response to conditions. In a micro sense, we evolve. Not all of this evolution simply furthers the goal of survival, as in simple Darwinian evolution -- in fact, the opposite often takes place as we intentionally do things we know run the risk of killing ourselves. I think, in large part, that our complex social structures have created this need for higher thinking.
Or is it the other way around? I bet we can approach the question both ways and come up with workable artifically intelligent schemes.
My point was that AI goes beyond pure maths, and (IMHO) requires interaction with the environment to develop.
I would amend your statement: "My point was that AI goes beyond pure math, and requires interaction with an environment to develop".
People have created autonomous programs that, while exhibiting no individual intelligence, nevertheless show collective responses to stimuli. Those stimuli need not be real-world stimuli to be "intelligence" -- they could be completely digital stimuli.
The robots people are developing, however, are a valuable tool toward progress. The main reason is that people want robots. They want to have someone do the mundane work for them so they can do something else.
If your slave has no eyes, ears, tongue, arms, or legs, of what use is the slave? At that point, the slave is a burden that must be cared for, rather than an autonomous being that can help care for you. What people want are mechanical slaves so that they do not feel bad about the enslavement (and, one must argue, is it truly enslavement if the creation was made for a particular task?).
I make no bones about it. I want an AI that knows when I wake up in the morning, reminds me to do my exercises, picks up after me, handles weeding my garden if I don't get around to it (it's cathartic, but some days I'm tired), helps educate and be a playmate for my children, suggests solutions for complicated computing issues I'm working on, assists my wife in household chores or frees her from them entirely so she can work on more enlightening pursuits, and cooks a good dinner every night.
And I'll keep hacking my little IRC bots until I either understand enough to make one that does this for me, or they are available at Wal-Mart for $15,000 apiece.
But, umm, back to the original point -- The stimuli used to create the AI, and carry on initial research, need not be physical. Thus theoretical artifical intelligence researchers probably need not obsess about robotics. However, for practical applications of artificial intelligence, you need to have some sort of interaction. A teletype interface is all well and good, but it can't cook my dinner.
Once we can define what it is we're trying to artificialize, maybe we can make more progress in artificializing it.
There's the rub. I don't think we can begin to understand how the brain works until we build stuff that approximates its operation enough to create working theories. The Wright Brothers didn't have a full understanding of flight dynamics prior to building their first aircraft. We've come to that knowledge through a lot of trial, error, and testing.
The main problem is that intelligence is such a nebulous thing. The Wrights had one goal: "make it fly". Now when engineers design, they use that basic goal and expand it with "faster", "safer", "more manueverable", "more fuel-efficient", "able to carry this weapons loading", "lower stall speed", "stall avoidance in low-speed turns", etc. We need to come up with some basic rules on what capabilities we expect out of an AI, then expand on it.
We have some pieces of that now. Like the little round vacuum-cleaner thing. The goal is for it to vacuum floors. Great, it does that. Now make it navigate stairs. Once it can do that, then make it learn to pick up stuff on the floor, rather than vacuuming around it. Then maybe create an attachment that allows it to load a dishwasher.
You get the idea.
I think the point of view of people that think AI has "failed" is a bit skewed. Yeah, we don't have any AI that can reason at human level yet. But we have devices that can easily beat the intelligence of roaches. And we're working on things that can exceed or augment the intelligence of small mammals at this point. We'll get there, but incremental progress is the only way it's going to happen, IMHO. And we'll arrive at the goal from several different directions, probably including analog (mechanical approach, responding to stimuli using non-digital means), emergent behaviors (colonies of processes), neural net, and hybrids of these, each of which can complement the other in creating reliable systems that use different logic depending on the context of the item they are analyzing.
This discussion really, really makes me want to go back to school and get a doctorate specializing in AI. I feel like such a goober noober discussing this stuff in public, but my gut feeling is that competent, ubiquitous AI will be the catalyst toward improving the human condition around the world.
I'm a formerly religious person who abandoned the faith for the uncertainty of saying "I don't know" over the course of this last year. It was a tough personal and family decision to speak out about my lack of faith, rather than continue to hide it and pretend to be a faithful churchgoer.
In this context, I understand the meaning of his aside. To many of the pious, the firing of synapses and interrelationships of the human brain are manifestations of the will of the spirit or soul. Many outspoken theists also believe that the creation of true intelligence is a goal completely beyond our reach, because only God can create real intelligence. Alternatively, some embrace the philosophy that our intelligences have always existed, and that God gave them a mortal body to inhabit. They reason that any attempt to artifically create intelligence can only create a golem, something that has no "soul" and therefore cannot possibly be intelligent, think, or feel anything.
Now, please realize I'm not attempting to stereotype theists in this mold. I know many intelligent, well-educated, logical, and inspired devout believers, some of whom have made advances in artificial intelligence in software programming. Generally, the most intelligent among them do tend to exhibit a bit of non-traditional thinking on certain topics where the religious and scientific viewpoints have an apparent disagreement:) I say "apparent" because generally they see no disparity between their religious beliefs and scientific viewpoints. And that's OK.
On the other hand, to those who no longer embrace theism, the world is often a fundamental conflict of religious and scientific thought. The author of the original comment apparently perceived a conflict between a scientific outlook of personality and intelligence being shaped by the interrelationships of brain synapses, and the frequent religious outlook that such things are an effect, not a cause, of personality in an individual. I don't think it was entirely out of place, but, that said, you're right; this Slashdot discussion had no theological components until he brought it up:)
Re:Common misconceptions about commodities&RAM
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DRAM Price Fixing
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· Score: 1
Flash RAM write cycles now number in the several millions. For the vast majority of applications, this works out just fine. Flash is generally built to use the entire bank of RAM before beginning again at the start, thus limiting the number of writes per sector.
An easy example: let's assume you're a terrific shutterbug, using a 64 Mbyte Flash SD card in your digital camera. You are photographing at 2000x2000 or something, so each jpeg is about a megabyte. Assuming you take 64 photos a day, every day, for the rest of your life, you'll die long, long before your flash RAM would.
However, there are other failures (due to heat, droppage, and burnout of the flashing circuitry mostly) that kill flash long before the instability of the media itself becomes an issue. If the device is designed with the limitation on writes of Flash in mind, then write cycles are a red herring for not buying. If, however, you're using a device that for some reason can get several million writes to the same sector in a short period of time, you'll have the problem you describe.
I've been using a USB mouse hooked into the back of my Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro for several years now. Works just fine. I even have a second USB port on the back of the keyboard for my digital camera, MP3 player, and whatnot.
Re:I can attest to the overvaluation of producers.
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Cheap Audio Production
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· Score: 1
I still maintain that spending $3,000-$5,000 gets "90% there" on your recordings. However, I've heard some on the threads here maintain that you need to figure the cost of instruments and all the assorted stuff to support them into your studio cost, too. I don't think so, though. A studio is separate from the gear I use to perform with (easily $10,000 worth of instruments/synths/amps/etc.) I use them in my studio, but it's not a cost for my studio.
But yeah, a pair of decent mics, boom stands, and a preamp will go a LONG way to making decent-sounding recordings. Even better, if you realize that your singing voice sucks (like mine does), you focus on the instruments and try to find ways to jack everything "clean" into the mixer so and add all the effects afterwards...
While it's not an "apples to apples" comparison, the point of the poster was valid -- and interesting. We have no intrinsic obligation to pass along savings to anybody else. Presuming that we do is neither logical nor does evidence support it.
Oh, and you can compare apples to oranges just fine:) Just like with apples and oranges, rent and music production share far more in common than one might at first think.
I tend to adhere to the latter vision. There is no way in hell I could reproduce live what I put to CD; I'm a solo artist at this point, after all. However, I could come pretty darn close through judicious use of sequencers in a live setup. Oh, and more gear. Always gotta buy more gear!
Doing a good mic rig on a drumset is definitely the most expensive part of a home-studio recording rig. That's why I chose to forego it in favor of drum loops and MIDI drummer recordings. Yeah, you're going to lay out a ton of bucks to be able to bring a band into your recording studio, but for most home-studio musicians, that's irrelevant anyway. Most of us build our studios so that we can record our music there, often performed, mastered, and burned right from the same machine and by the same person.
You can use drapes or egg cartons on the walls to create a studio space. You can use audio plugins to remove extraneous noise on your recording. Most non-piano/non-drum instruments record best with one or two microphones, and they needn't cost $1,000 each for really good sound quality -- $100 each will probably suffice in most cases. You can record rock and roll using Pro Tools, drum samples, live recordings of electric guitars (clean feed straight into the mixer, all distortion/effects done in post-process), etc. There are tons and tons of creative ways to avoid spending money in home audio recording, but most of them require, instead, you spend your time.
To those of us who simply want to get our music out there and in front of listeners, which is probably most of the garage-band and soloist crowd, a pro audio rig is an awesome answer to the question of "where are we gonna get the money to make an album?". But if you don't spend the money on a good mic system, though, you are probably going to end up spending it on all your loop libraries, MIDI devices, and time invested working around your lack of good audio hardware. I speak from experience here:) It's NOT a cheap hobby, but it's feasible to create an home studio recording setup that sounds decent (as in, better than most albums produced 25 years ago) for just a few hundred bucks, and one that sounds indistinguishable (on an audio CD) from "pro" recordings for about $2,000 more. And it will suck away your time faster than you thought possible.
I must caveat, though, that orchestral movie scores and non-amplified live instruments are a lot tougher to do well in a home pro audio rig than in a real studio. There are space requirements, temperature and humidity requirements, special seats (because the noise of people on folding chairs in a 20-seat orchestra is actually quite loud), other special sound-dampening equipment and video tie-ins... yeah, it gets incredibly expensive. But pro audio is "good enough" for most straight-up rock and roll, R&B, solo, and small ensemble recording. You spend the first $3,000 getting to the 90% quality level, and the remaining $300,000 chasing that last 10%.
So I'd sum up by saying yeah, it's expensive to make a good recording. But the money need not be spent in the areas you describe. Most good musicians can also make themselves into good engineers and producers if they take the time and gather some outside feedback on their music. The latter is critical, as once you've listened to a tune 7,000 times while recording it you've become immune to the crappiness of various parts...
Protux is nowhere near Protools-level yet. It's in 0.16 release, not nearly studio-complete, and hardly usable right now. While I love GNU tools, there's nothing in the GNU/Linux world yet that provides even the basics that professional users need by itself.
Now, some people have already produced albums with Ardour, and that's pretty cool. They are few and far-between at this point, though, and as far as I'm aware have relied on non-free packages to finish the album. With ProTools, you sit down with your gear and create an album start-to-finish using ProTools-based tools. Real audio dev work is pretty different from plugging a mic and a midi cable into your Sound Blaster Live.
I'm not trying to be a ProTools evangelist, but I've worked with it, free software, and other commercial audio/video development software. There's some good stuff out there, but for sheer completeness, it's ProTools followed closely by Cakewalk Sonar. For good A/V production, you really need a combination of various tools to get the job done right. I expect it will take free software developers about another 2-4 years to approach the level of usability present in pro audio packages today. I'm trying to do my little part to help bring that along, and I think with all the development effort being focussed in this area right now, it won't be too long before the early adopter crowd goes after these tools in droves. But right now, nothing is ready for prime-time as far as I've been able to tell.
The big thing for Pro Tools is that it has been around a very, very long time, and is the industry standard. Cakewalk and its ilk have also been around for a while, but at least in Cakewalk's case it started out as a MIDI sequencing program in the early 1990's -- and many people still think of it that way.
So yeah, there are a lot of programs that do this. But Pro Tools is, and has been for a decade, the industry standard in professional hard disk recording systems. Some great things you can do with a Pro Tools setup:
Looping tracks
Extending lengths of tracks with little (if any) distortion of the source. Think drum loops, changing them from 148bpm to 140bpm. The aliasing gets worse as you go further from the source speed, though.
automated punch-in/punch-out
undo. This is a huge win for tapeless over tape-based studios!
noise extraction
the list goes on...
The basic thing is, Rolling Stone is finally catching on to the what musicians have been doing in the mainstream for about 7 years now, and that's completely tapeless recording, and the move of recording out of the studio and into other places. There are enough plugins out there to clean up sound from even very noisy areas, so the need for a completely silent "studio" is much less. Studios are definitely going out of business as a result of this move to home-studio-based recording, and ProTools is generally a compatability requirement.
Me, I use Cakewalk Sonar at home, and this is one area where no free software product yet comes close. I'm on the Ardour mailing list, and use Ardour periodically to see how it's coming along, but definitely nothing there yet to replace my studio setup.
So to answer your question, Pro Tools is simply one of many hard-disk recording packages. However, among professionals it is the most widely used, and boasts a much larger library of compatible software than any competitor. Oh, and until about 4 years ago, it was Mac-only.
I know that some media (CR-R's for example) have hit media thresholds... but they're still MUCH faster than tape at current speeds.
LTO tapes in a two or three drive array can push upwards of 100 megabytes per second writing to tape. I've yet to see any optical solution even approach that speed. Our venerable DLT drives can come pretty close to that, too, and any reasonably modern SCSI (less than 10-year-old) tape drive should be able to consistently get at least 20 megabytes/sec to tape.
1x CD-R = 150Kbytes/sec. 16xCD-R = 2.4Mbytes/sec. I've yet to see any CD-R or DVD-R that truly exceeds 16x write on the inner tracks. Not much higher than that, and CD media begins to fail from the massive edge rotation speed.
However, you'd be right if you're talking about recovery time. Optical media has much, much lower seek times than magnetic tape, and this gives it the advantage hands-down for recovery of individual files. But in terms of pure write speed, or pure system restoration speed which is largely contiguous blocks, the only thing I'm aware of that comes close to a hard disk array as discussed in the article is an array of tape drives.
Of course, I'd love one of the backup systems discussed in the article. Even better, to solve the "off-site" problem, set up a second one over a DS-3 link at some remote location and get them to mirror each other. That would be cool.
This is the exact relationship my wife and I have on road trips. If we need to ask for directions, she does the asking while I sit in the car and look at the map, or entertain the kids.
It works well. Of course, translating those directions from some local into something I can use is sometimes difficult, but it's what we do and so far it does the job!
The above poster's comment is spot-on. I've had P810 and G810 monitors for years, and they are simply awesome. Crisp display, 21", lots of inputs. The P series generally has a few more features, inputs, and higher supported refresh rates, but otherwise the P and G series monitors are identical.
I'm using a pair of Optiquest Q115 monitors right now at work, and although they are still "viewsonic" under the hood, they really do suck. With monitors, you really do get what you pay for. I have to crank these down to to 1280x1024 to get nicely viewable text, even after adjusting my convergence. With my old Viewsonic P810, 1600x1200 was perfectly readable with small fonts.
For desktop computers, too, these days LCDs are a GREAT value. They have come down a ton in price, to match the price of CRT's 4 or 5 years ago in the same sizes. If you buy a good video card with a DVI output, and a good LCD monitor with DVI in, the results can be astoundingly good. Even comparing text @ 1280x1024 on my 21" CRT to the 12" LCD @ 1024x768 on my laptop using sub-pixel anti-aliasing, the readability of text is just far, far better on LCD. LCDs using VGA inputs provide markedly inferior display. Still good, but not as good.
If you have the bucks, go for an LCD. Most high-quality LCD's with DVI input are perfect for programming and usual computer work, and quite good for gaming. If your primary goal is to see every frame of your Unreal Tournament 2003 game when you're getting 90 frames per second, LCDs can still be good but because they just can't display that many frames per second they can be disappointing for some hard-core gamers. I want a pair of 19" DVI LCDs for my home PC:)
You were looking for an example of a lie... there you go.
That's a bit thin. If he's using OS as "Open Source", then what he has said is true. Linux kernel defects are generally fixed within a few hours of their discovery. Microsoft defects, if fixed at all (there are some known local security bugs that were allowed to go for years without a fix), generally take at least 30 days.
It is enough to be a decent base for the opinion that bugfixes are released much more quickly for many open source projects than Microsoft has historically done. There are exceptions on both sides of the fence, but historically, it is probably a true statement.
I wouldn't call it a lie, but I would call it a generalization with few exceptions that can generally be relied upon to be correct. It's kind of like saying the sky is blue. I know some parts of the country where it is a uniform, hazy gray most of the time, but in general, saying "the sky is blue" is a true statement.
I thought it was common knowledge that this was how Microsoft treated their volume licensing customers. It was what we figured would happen with our several-hundred license shop when we decided to shut down, and it's played out that way.
The company I work for has one of these agreements with Microsoft, and is about to make payment number two of three in a few months. It's about $20,000 every year for 400 licenses or so. When we informed them we were closing the business before the third payment would come due, they in turn informed us that they would hold us to the letter of the contract, and require that third payment in full.
So if you decide to close your business one month into an MS volume licensing agreement, expect you will have to figure in the next two payments for part of your cost of closing the business. Or else file bankruptcy to get out of it. Either way, Microsoft will inform you that you owe in full to the last penny of your agreement if you try to get out early, and you'll be left holding the bag at the end with whatever version of the software was the "latest" at the time the SA ran out. It sucks, but at the time the decision was made the company was moving to become an all-Microsoft shop. I came in several months after they abandoned that approach (thank goodness), but we are left with the legacy. So we'll be forking out another $20K next year for 360+ unused seats if we want to get the most value out of the contract, even though we'll have a handful of people as a skeleton crew.
This is yet another reason I pushed hard for an all-GNU/Linux approach. Unfortunately, we discovered to our disappointment that GNU/Linux cannot yet handle the needs of a small financial institution like ours. You can chalk that up to lack of good bank-level accounting, payment processing, recovery (in the repossession sense, not tape backups), and loan origination/management software. Eh, well, the stuff for Windows isn't much better than doing it by hand yet either unless you're really big:) And most of what we're doing has been running off our AS/400 up until now anyway.
Oh, yeah, what was my point? Right, if you buy into these agreements, what you save in convenience you pay in terms of contract inflexibility. Know what you're getting into at the get-go, that it's not something you can get out of or "transfer" (despite language to the contrary in the contract which is only for small numbers of machines to individual transferees with somewhat onerous record-keeping requirements), and that you're not really paying for ongoing support, but instead just for the licenses to use the product.
Makes me wish I could start up a new company using solely free software, making annual grants of $20K or so to free software developers...
Hey, wow, someone that uses the same solution I do:) Cool! Well, at least the pine bit. I found spamassassin pretty annoying with false positives at too high a threshold, and too annoying with not blocking much of anything at too low. TMDI seems a pretty good option, or I installed a Bayes filter in Squirrelmail where I work, and that seems pretty incredibly effective. Maybe I'll get to work on Squirrelmail on my openbsd firewall...
Not to put too sharp a point on it, but for some of us spam filtering is not too huge an issue. You have to reach a critical mass of spam before it's annoying enough to make you really want to do something about it.
I still only get 3-4 spams a day in my barnson.org addresses (real, non-obfuscated address linked in my user profile). I expect in 3-4 years, that number will have gone up exponentially, and I'll need to deal with the annoyance of running spam filters.
I've only had the domain a year, so maybe that's why it's not on everybody's list yet.
I hate to reply to a sig rather than a post, but Gentoo is very relevant for GNU/Linux pro audio. Notably, Ardour is not yet distributed as a package, so compiling from source is currently your only option. Gentoo is ideal for this purpose, as it seamlessly handles building it. There are also other audio packages that have better support if you build for your particular environment.
However, I use Gentoo in one spot only and for that specific purpose: my pro audio GNU/Linux workstation. I use Redhat or Mandrake elsewhere...
Back to your post: 3D audio and full support is important for those musicians who wish to mix their audio in 5.1 channels. It's actually really a big deal for a lot of musicians. I'm disappointed that I can't use my Soundblaster Live! 5.1 in GNU/Linux to handle that well. There are some hacks around, but I've not yet gotten them to work (I haven't tried for about 3 or 4 months, about ready to try again).
Most wave table cards are a joke. I have a full-sized digital piano that, despite my best efforts to the contrary, refuses to budge when I hook up my game port MIDI stuff to it under Linux. Works all right under Windows, curiously. Once again, I'm building a new audio workstation right now, so maybe that will change by the time I get home from work.
Timidity is too resource-intensive for real multi-track work at this point in time. It can do if you're dumping a single MIDI track to an audio track, but the latency is pretty horrible, as are the dropouts. Latency I can deal with by bumping the MIDI stream to start a little sooner, but sound dropouts are just not acceptable, and seem to happen quite frequently with timidity. I'm rebuilding everything latest version right now on my home machine, so I'll have more results in a few hours as to whether this is still a problem, but it certainly was a quarter ago.
I'd really love to build a pro-audio "device" that runs Linux under the hood for non-gearheads to use to record audio. But as of right now, when I compare Cakewalk Sonar to what I have on GNU/Linux... GNU/Linux leaves much to be desired. Doesn't mean I'm not working my butt off testing the stuff, because I want to have a wholly free home recording studio. But it still lacks, a lot. I figure in about 1-3 years it will be much, much better as more amateur and professional musicians get into recording on GNU/Linux.
Re:A pro audio platform would be cool...
on
Linux Audio Development
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· Score: 2, Informative
I ran into this same problem often with Ardour and others. I gave up, and installed Gentoo. Although it takes a bit of "geek eliteness" to get Gentoo installed (knowing how to compile a kernel, mount filesystems, work with Grub, etc.), it's worth the effort.
Once Gentoo is installed, installing Ardour is a one-liner:
# ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge ardour-cvs
If your system is slower than 1GHz, check on it every few hours. You needn't do much else while it builds Ardour and all the dependencies to get there. I recommend starting this right before you go to bed, by morning it might be done. Gentoo is a bit like baking a turkey. Yeah, it takes a very long time to cook, but if you took the time to prepare it right, the result is beautiful and tasty. Unless, of course, you're a vegetarian...
That's really what it broiled down to with me. I'm far more patient with allowing stuff to build automatically over hours/days and not using my main PC (lucky me, I have three) for hours/days than with sitting in front of the console for hours working out dependencies by hand.
Most people who are familiar with GNU/Linux audio development refer to the "Open Sound System/Free Version" as "OSS/Free". Unfortunately, this is often confused with "Open Source Software/Free Software", which is also sometimes abbreviated "OSS/Free".
Even better, I often talk about running something in "UML", or "User-Mode Linux", at work. Until I explained, many people were thinking I was talking about "UML", (I think it's an abbreviation for) "Unified Markup Language". They thought it was amazing I could do all this cool stuff with kernels and isolation using a prototyping & flowcharting language.
When in doubt, use the full name first and the abbreviation later...
Slashdot Mirror
The point is not to prevent copying. It is to destroy the movie rental business, or at least give the studios a much larger take. It's another "magic bullet" that the large studios have been looking for to bring in to eliminate the annoying rental houses that detract from their profits.
The nifty fringe benefit may be to eventually destroy the "fair use" argument used by those defending cracking of their security algorithms. If you defeat the protection on the disc (using one or more of the techniques already discussed here), you were only licensed it for 48 hours -- you have no fair use rights beyond that time limit. Ditto for duping a copy to your hard disc. Yeah, rip all you like for 48 hours, but if you're prosecuted, you have zero rights to that media after that time window expires.
I'm concerned about the recyclability factor, but not so much about the introduction of the media. From where I sit, it will probably play out a lot like phone cards. Yeah, there's a certain segment of the population that uses disposable phone cards rabidly. There are others that use them on an as-needed basis, and still others (like myself) that have never used a disposable phone card and never intend to. The studios know that people like to watch movies once a year or whatever, and they'd be stupid to ignore that segment of the population.
And if it doesn't drive the price of real DVD's up, why should I care? I'm not a huge fan of the MPAA or RIAA, but neither am I averse to rewarding them for publicizing quality entertainment that I really enjoy. The release of Evanescence's album, "Fallen", has me totally spellbound right now. And I'm really not the kind of person to normally listen to an album over and over...
Anyway, that's a tangent. There are a lot of "stick it to the MP/RIAA"-types here on Slashdot, and for them the self-destructing, cheap DVDs will be a boon. For those of us who feel a desire to reward artists legitimately for the enjoyment we get from their craft, we'll still have all the old options left...
The gal getting all worked up about naming is kind of barking up the wrong tree. Yeah, that's the project's name for the time being. However, Firebird will fall out of regular use here within the next few months...
I concur. The only times I feel the age of my 933MHz Pentium III is on certain levels in Unreal Tournament, and when I'm compiling a new kernel and realize it takes three times longer than the newest benchmarks.
The 970 looks exciting, but I personally am anticipating the release only for the dramatic price reduction it should bring in the older Macs. At that point, I'll go get that Powerbook -- once I can pick up a decent one for less than $2,000.
I would maintain that human beings are responding in a hard-wired way as well. It's a matter of scale.
The rough thing to figure out about people is our curious ability to change ourselves. In lower organisms, they behave in exceptionally predictable ways. Even they can be trained, but reaction to higher-level stimuli is beyond their power. Yet humans can and will change their own thoughts in response to conditions. In a micro sense, we evolve. Not all of this evolution simply furthers the goal of survival, as in simple Darwinian evolution -- in fact, the opposite often takes place as we intentionally do things we know run the risk of killing ourselves. I think, in large part, that our complex social structures have created this need for higher thinking.
Or is it the other way around? I bet we can approach the question both ways and come up with workable artifically intelligent schemes.
I would amend your statement:
"My point was that AI goes beyond pure math, and requires interaction with an environment to develop".
People have created autonomous programs that, while exhibiting no individual intelligence, nevertheless show collective responses to stimuli. Those stimuli need not be real-world stimuli to be "intelligence" -- they could be completely digital stimuli.
The robots people are developing, however, are a valuable tool toward progress. The main reason is that people want robots. They want to have someone do the mundane work for them so they can do something else.
If your slave has no eyes, ears, tongue, arms, or legs, of what use is the slave? At that point, the slave is a burden that must be cared for, rather than an autonomous being that can help care for you. What people want are mechanical slaves so that they do not feel bad about the enslavement (and, one must argue, is it truly enslavement if the creation was made for a particular task?).
I make no bones about it. I want an AI that knows when I wake up in the morning, reminds me to do my exercises, picks up after me, handles weeding my garden if I don't get around to it (it's cathartic, but some days I'm tired), helps educate and be a playmate for my children, suggests solutions for complicated computing issues I'm working on, assists my wife in household chores or frees her from them entirely so she can work on more enlightening pursuits, and cooks a good dinner every night.
And I'll keep hacking my little IRC bots until I either understand enough to make one that does this for me, or they are available at Wal-Mart for $15,000 apiece.
But, umm, back to the original point -- The stimuli used to create the AI, and carry on initial research, need not be physical. Thus theoretical artifical intelligence researchers probably need not obsess about robotics. However, for practical applications of artificial intelligence, you need to have some sort of interaction. A teletype interface is all well and good, but it can't cook my dinner.
There's the rub. I don't think we can begin to understand how the brain works until we build stuff that approximates its operation enough to create working theories. The Wright Brothers didn't have a full understanding of flight dynamics prior to building their first aircraft. We've come to that knowledge through a lot of trial, error, and testing.
The main problem is that intelligence is such a nebulous thing. The Wrights had one goal: "make it fly". Now when engineers design, they use that basic goal and expand it with "faster", "safer", "more manueverable", "more fuel-efficient", "able to carry this weapons loading", "lower stall speed", "stall avoidance in low-speed turns", etc. We need to come up with some basic rules on what capabilities we expect out of an AI, then expand on it.
We have some pieces of that now. Like the little round vacuum-cleaner thing. The goal is for it to vacuum floors. Great, it does that. Now make it navigate stairs. Once it can do that, then make it learn to pick up stuff on the floor, rather than vacuuming around it. Then maybe create an attachment that allows it to load a dishwasher.
You get the idea.
I think the point of view of people that think AI has "failed" is a bit skewed. Yeah, we don't have any AI that can reason at human level yet. But we have devices that can easily beat the intelligence of roaches. And we're working on things that can exceed or augment the intelligence of small mammals at this point. We'll get there, but incremental progress is the only way it's going to happen, IMHO. And we'll arrive at the goal from several different directions, probably including analog (mechanical approach, responding to stimuli using non-digital means), emergent behaviors (colonies of processes), neural net, and hybrids of these, each of which can complement the other in creating reliable systems that use different logic depending on the context of the item they are analyzing.
This discussion really, really makes me want to go back to school and get a doctorate specializing in AI. I feel like such a goober noober discussing this stuff in public, but my gut feeling is that competent, ubiquitous AI will be the catalyst toward improving the human condition around the world.
My take:
:) I say "apparent" because generally they see no disparity between their religious beliefs and scientific viewpoints. And that's OK.
:)
I'm a formerly religious person who abandoned the faith for the uncertainty of saying "I don't know" over the course of this last year. It was a tough personal and family decision to speak out about my lack of faith, rather than continue to hide it and pretend to be a faithful churchgoer.
In this context, I understand the meaning of his aside. To many of the pious, the firing of synapses and interrelationships of the human brain are manifestations of the will of the spirit or soul. Many outspoken theists also believe that the creation of true intelligence is a goal completely beyond our reach, because only God can create real intelligence. Alternatively, some embrace the philosophy that our intelligences have always existed, and that God gave them a mortal body to inhabit. They reason that any attempt to artifically create intelligence can only create a golem, something that has no "soul" and therefore cannot possibly be intelligent, think, or feel anything.
Now, please realize I'm not attempting to stereotype theists in this mold. I know many intelligent, well-educated, logical, and inspired devout believers, some of whom have made advances in artificial intelligence in software programming. Generally, the most intelligent among them do tend to exhibit a bit of non-traditional thinking on certain topics where the religious and scientific viewpoints have an apparent disagreement
On the other hand, to those who no longer embrace theism, the world is often a fundamental conflict of religious and scientific thought. The author of the original comment apparently perceived a conflict between a scientific outlook of personality and intelligence being shaped by the interrelationships of brain synapses, and the frequent religious outlook that such things are an effect, not a cause, of personality in an individual. I don't think it was entirely out of place, but, that said, you're right; this Slashdot discussion had no theological components until he brought it up
Flash RAM write cycles now number in the several millions. For the vast majority of applications, this works out just fine. Flash is generally built to use the entire bank of RAM before beginning again at the start, thus limiting the number of writes per sector.
An easy example: let's assume you're a terrific shutterbug, using a 64 Mbyte Flash SD card in your digital camera. You are photographing at 2000x2000 or something, so each jpeg is about a megabyte. Assuming you take 64 photos a day, every day, for the rest of your life, you'll die long, long before your flash RAM would.
However, there are other failures (due to heat, droppage, and burnout of the flashing circuitry mostly) that kill flash long before the instability of the media itself becomes an issue. If the device is designed with the limitation on writes of Flash in mind, then write cycles are a red herring for not buying. If, however, you're using a device that for some reason can get several million writes to the same sector in a short period of time, you'll have the problem you describe.
I've been using a USB mouse hooked into the back of my Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro for several years now. Works just fine. I even have a second USB port on the back of the keyboard for my digital camera, MP3 player, and whatnot.
I still maintain that spending $3,000-$5,000 gets "90% there" on your recordings. However, I've heard some on the threads here maintain that you need to figure the cost of instruments and all the assorted stuff to support them into your studio cost, too. I don't think so, though. A studio is separate from the gear I use to perform with (easily $10,000 worth of instruments/synths/amps/etc.) I use them in my studio, but it's not a cost for my studio.
But yeah, a pair of decent mics, boom stands, and a preamp will go a LONG way to making decent-sounding recordings. Even better, if you realize that your singing voice sucks (like mine does), you focus on the instruments and try to find ways to jack everything "clean" into the mixer so and add all the effects afterwards...
While it's not an "apples to apples" comparison, the point of the poster was valid -- and interesting. We have no intrinsic obligation to pass along savings to anybody else. Presuming that we do is neither logical nor does evidence support it.
:) Just like with apples and oranges, rent and music production share far more in common than one might at first think.
Oh, and you can compare apples to oranges just fine
I tend to adhere to the latter vision. There is no way in hell I could reproduce live what I put to CD; I'm a solo artist at this point, after all. However, I could come pretty darn close through judicious use of sequencers in a live setup. Oh, and more gear. Always gotta buy more gear!
I feel the need to reply :)
:) It's NOT a cheap hobby, but it's feasible to create an home studio recording setup that sounds decent (as in, better than most albums produced 25 years ago) for just a few hundred bucks, and one that sounds indistinguishable (on an audio CD) from "pro" recordings for about $2,000 more. And it will suck away your time faster than you thought possible.
Doing a good mic rig on a drumset is definitely the most expensive part of a home-studio recording rig. That's why I chose to forego it in favor of drum loops and MIDI drummer recordings. Yeah, you're going to lay out a ton of bucks to be able to bring a band into your recording studio, but for most home-studio musicians, that's irrelevant anyway. Most of us build our studios so that we can record our music there, often performed, mastered, and burned right from the same machine and by the same person.
You can use drapes or egg cartons on the walls to create a studio space. You can use audio plugins to remove extraneous noise on your recording. Most non-piano/non-drum instruments record best with one or two microphones, and they needn't cost $1,000 each for really good sound quality -- $100 each will probably suffice in most cases. You can record rock and roll using Pro Tools, drum samples, live recordings of electric guitars (clean feed straight into the mixer, all distortion/effects done in post-process), etc. There are tons and tons of creative ways to avoid spending money in home audio recording, but most of them require, instead, you spend your time.
To those of us who simply want to get our music out there and in front of listeners, which is probably most of the garage-band and soloist crowd, a pro audio rig is an awesome answer to the question of "where are we gonna get the money to make an album?". But if you don't spend the money on a good mic system, though, you are probably going to end up spending it on all your loop libraries, MIDI devices, and time invested working around your lack of good audio hardware. I speak from experience here
I must caveat, though, that orchestral movie scores and non-amplified live instruments are a lot tougher to do well in a home pro audio rig than in a real studio. There are space requirements, temperature and humidity requirements, special seats (because the noise of people on folding chairs in a 20-seat orchestra is actually quite loud), other special sound-dampening equipment and video tie-ins... yeah, it gets incredibly expensive. But pro audio is "good enough" for most straight-up rock and roll, R&B, solo, and small ensemble recording. You spend the first $3,000 getting to the 90% quality level, and the remaining $300,000 chasing that last 10%.
So I'd sum up by saying yeah, it's expensive to make a good recording. But the money need not be spent in the areas you describe. Most good musicians can also make themselves into good engineers and producers if they take the time and gather some outside feedback on their music. The latter is critical, as once you've listened to a tune 7,000 times while recording it you've become immune to the crappiness of various parts...
Protux is nowhere near Protools-level yet. It's in 0.16 release, not nearly studio-complete, and hardly usable right now. While I love GNU tools, there's nothing in the GNU/Linux world yet that provides even the basics that professional users need by itself.
Now, some people have already produced albums with Ardour, and that's pretty cool. They are few and far-between at this point, though, and as far as I'm aware have relied on non-free packages to finish the album. With ProTools, you sit down with your gear and create an album start-to-finish using ProTools-based tools. Real audio dev work is pretty different from plugging a mic and a midi cable into your Sound Blaster Live.
I'm not trying to be a ProTools evangelist, but I've worked with it, free software, and other commercial audio/video development software. There's some good stuff out there, but for sheer completeness, it's ProTools followed closely by Cakewalk Sonar. For good A/V production, you really need a combination of various tools to get the job done right. I expect it will take free software developers about another 2-4 years to approach the level of usability present in pro audio packages today. I'm trying to do my little part to help bring that along, and I think with all the development effort being focussed in this area right now, it won't be too long before the early adopter crowd goes after these tools in droves. But right now, nothing is ready for prime-time as far as I've been able to tell.
So yeah, there are a lot of programs that do this. But Pro Tools is, and has been for a decade, the industry standard in professional hard disk recording systems. Some great things you can do with a Pro Tools setup:
The basic thing is, Rolling Stone is finally catching on to the what musicians have been doing in the mainstream for about 7 years now, and that's completely tapeless recording, and the move of recording out of the studio and into other places. There are enough plugins out there to clean up sound from even very noisy areas, so the need for a completely silent "studio" is much less. Studios are definitely going out of business as a result of this move to home-studio-based recording, and ProTools is generally a compatability requirement.
Me, I use Cakewalk Sonar at home, and this is one area where no free software product yet comes close. I'm on the Ardour mailing list, and use Ardour periodically to see how it's coming along, but definitely nothing there yet to replace my studio setup.
So to answer your question, Pro Tools is simply one of many hard-disk recording packages. However, among professionals it is the most widely used, and boasts a much larger library of compatible software than any competitor. Oh, and until about 4 years ago, it was Mac-only.
LTO tapes in a two or three drive array can push upwards of 100 megabytes per second writing to tape. I've yet to see any optical solution even approach that speed. Our venerable DLT drives can come pretty close to that, too, and any reasonably modern SCSI (less than 10-year-old) tape drive should be able to consistently get at least 20 megabytes/sec to tape.
1x CD-R = 150Kbytes/sec. 16xCD-R = 2.4Mbytes/sec. I've yet to see any CD-R or DVD-R that truly exceeds 16x write on the inner tracks. Not much higher than that, and CD media begins to fail from the massive edge rotation speed.
However, you'd be right if you're talking about recovery time. Optical media has much, much lower seek times than magnetic tape, and this gives it the advantage hands-down for recovery of individual files. But in terms of pure write speed, or pure system restoration speed which is largely contiguous blocks, the only thing I'm aware of that comes close to a hard disk array as discussed in the article is an array of tape drives.
Of course, I'd love one of the backup systems discussed in the article. Even better, to solve the "off-site" problem, set up a second one over a DS-3 link at some remote location and get them to mirror each other. That would be cool.
This is the exact relationship my wife and I have on road trips. If we need to ask for directions, she does the asking while I sit in the car and look at the map, or entertain the kids.
It works well. Of course, translating those directions from some local into something I can use is sometimes difficult, but it's what we do and so far it does the job!
The above poster's comment is spot-on. I've had P810 and G810 monitors for years, and they are simply awesome. Crisp display, 21", lots of inputs. The P series generally has a few more features, inputs, and higher supported refresh rates, but otherwise the P and G series monitors are identical.
:)
I'm using a pair of Optiquest Q115 monitors right now at work, and although they are still "viewsonic" under the hood, they really do suck. With monitors, you really do get what you pay for. I have to crank these down to to 1280x1024 to get nicely viewable text, even after adjusting my convergence. With my old Viewsonic P810, 1600x1200 was perfectly readable with small fonts.
For desktop computers, too, these days LCDs are a GREAT value. They have come down a ton in price, to match the price of CRT's 4 or 5 years ago in the same sizes. If you buy a good video card with a DVI output, and a good LCD monitor with DVI in, the results can be astoundingly good. Even comparing text @ 1280x1024 on my 21" CRT to the 12" LCD @ 1024x768 on my laptop using sub-pixel anti-aliasing, the readability of text is just far, far better on LCD. LCDs using VGA inputs provide markedly inferior display. Still good, but not as good.
If you have the bucks, go for an LCD. Most high-quality LCD's with DVI input are perfect for programming and usual computer work, and quite good for gaming. If your primary goal is to see every frame of your Unreal Tournament 2003 game when you're getting 90 frames per second, LCDs can still be good but because they just can't display that many frames per second they can be disappointing for some hard-core gamers. I want a pair of 19" DVI LCDs for my home PC
That's a bit thin. If he's using OS as "Open Source", then what he has said is true. Linux kernel defects are generally fixed within a few hours of their discovery. Microsoft defects, if fixed at all (there are some known local security bugs that were allowed to go for years without a fix), generally take at least 30 days.
It is enough to be a decent base for the opinion that bugfixes are released much more quickly for many open source projects than Microsoft has historically done. There are exceptions on both sides of the fence, but historically, it is probably a true statement.
I wouldn't call it a lie, but I would call it a generalization with few exceptions that can generally be relied upon to be correct. It's kind of like saying the sky is blue. I know some parts of the country where it is a uniform, hazy gray most of the time, but in general, saying "the sky is blue" is a true statement.
I thought it was common knowledge that this was how Microsoft treated their volume licensing customers. It was what we figured would happen with our several-hundred license shop when we decided to shut down, and it's played out that way.
:) And most of what we're doing has been running off our AS/400 up until now anyway.
The company I work for has one of these agreements with Microsoft, and is about to make payment number two of three in a few months. It's about $20,000 every year for 400 licenses or so. When we informed them we were closing the business before the third payment would come due, they in turn informed us that they would hold us to the letter of the contract, and require that third payment in full.
So if you decide to close your business one month into an MS volume licensing agreement, expect you will have to figure in the next two payments for part of your cost of closing the business. Or else file bankruptcy to get out of it. Either way, Microsoft will inform you that you owe in full to the last penny of your agreement if you try to get out early, and you'll be left holding the bag at the end with whatever version of the software was the "latest" at the time the SA ran out. It sucks, but at the time the decision was made the company was moving to become an all-Microsoft shop. I came in several months after they abandoned that approach (thank goodness), but we are left with the legacy. So we'll be forking out another $20K next year for 360+ unused seats if we want to get the most value out of the contract, even though we'll have a handful of people as a skeleton crew.
This is yet another reason I pushed hard for an all-GNU/Linux approach. Unfortunately, we discovered to our disappointment that GNU/Linux cannot yet handle the needs of a small financial institution like ours. You can chalk that up to lack of good bank-level accounting, payment processing, recovery (in the repossession sense, not tape backups), and loan origination/management software. Eh, well, the stuff for Windows isn't much better than doing it by hand yet either unless you're really big
Oh, yeah, what was my point? Right, if you buy into these agreements, what you save in convenience you pay in terms of contract inflexibility. Know what you're getting into at the get-go, that it's not something you can get out of or "transfer" (despite language to the contrary in the contract which is only for small numbers of machines to individual transferees with somewhat onerous record-keeping requirements), and that you're not really paying for ongoing support, but instead just for the licenses to use the product.
Makes me wish I could start up a new company using solely free software, making annual grants of $20K or so to free software developers...
Hey, wow, someone that uses the same solution I do :) Cool! Well, at least the pine bit. I found spamassassin pretty annoying with false positives at too high a threshold, and too annoying with not blocking much of anything at too low. TMDI seems a pretty good option, or I installed a Bayes filter in Squirrelmail where I work, and that seems pretty incredibly effective. Maybe I'll get to work on Squirrelmail on my openbsd firewall...
Not to put too sharp a point on it, but for some of us spam filtering is not too huge an issue. You have to reach a critical mass of spam before it's annoying enough to make you really want to do something about it.
I still only get 3-4 spams a day in my barnson.org addresses (real, non-obfuscated address linked in my user profile). I expect in 3-4 years, that number will have gone up exponentially, and I'll need to deal with the annoyance of running spam filters.
I've only had the domain a year, so maybe that's why it's not on everybody's list yet.
I hate to reply to a sig rather than a post, but Gentoo is very relevant for GNU/Linux pro audio. Notably, Ardour is not yet distributed as a package, so compiling from source is currently your only option. Gentoo is ideal for this purpose, as it seamlessly handles building it. There are also other audio packages that have better support if you build for your particular environment.
However, I use Gentoo in one spot only and for that specific purpose: my pro audio GNU/Linux workstation. I use Redhat or Mandrake elsewhere...
Back to your post: 3D audio and full support is important for those musicians who wish to mix their audio in 5.1 channels. It's actually really a big deal for a lot of musicians. I'm disappointed that I can't use my Soundblaster Live! 5.1 in GNU/Linux to handle that well. There are some hacks around, but I've not yet gotten them to work (I haven't tried for about 3 or 4 months, about ready to try again).
Most wave table cards are a joke. I have a full-sized digital piano that, despite my best efforts to the contrary, refuses to budge when I hook up my game port MIDI stuff to it under Linux. Works all right under Windows, curiously. Once again, I'm building a new audio workstation right now, so maybe that will change by the time I get home from work.
Timidity is too resource-intensive for real multi-track work at this point in time. It can do if you're dumping a single MIDI track to an audio track, but the latency is pretty horrible, as are the dropouts. Latency I can deal with by bumping the MIDI stream to start a little sooner, but sound dropouts are just not acceptable, and seem to happen quite frequently with timidity. I'm rebuilding everything latest version right now on my home machine, so I'll have more results in a few hours as to whether this is still a problem, but it certainly was a quarter ago.
I'd really love to build a pro-audio "device" that runs Linux under the hood for non-gearheads to use to record audio. But as of right now, when I compare Cakewalk Sonar to what I have on GNU/Linux... GNU/Linux leaves much to be desired. Doesn't mean I'm not working my butt off testing the stuff, because I want to have a wholly free home recording studio. But it still lacks, a lot. I figure in about 1-3 years it will be much, much better as more amateur and professional musicians get into recording on GNU/Linux.
I ran into this same problem often with Ardour and others. I gave up, and installed Gentoo. Although it takes a bit of "geek eliteness" to get Gentoo installed (knowing how to compile a kernel, mount filesystems, work with Grub, etc.), it's worth the effort.
Once Gentoo is installed, installing Ardour is a one-liner:
# ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge ardour-cvs
If your system is slower than 1GHz, check on it every few hours. You needn't do much else while it builds Ardour and all the dependencies to get there. I recommend starting this right before you go to bed, by morning it might be done. Gentoo is a bit like baking a turkey. Yeah, it takes a very long time to cook, but if you took the time to prepare it right, the result is beautiful and tasty. Unless, of course, you're a vegetarian...
That's really what it broiled down to with me. I'm far more patient with allowing stuff to build automatically over hours/days and not using my main PC (lucky me, I have three) for hours/days than with sitting in front of the console for hours working out dependencies by hand.
Most people who are familiar with GNU/Linux audio development refer to the "Open Sound System/Free Version" as "OSS/Free". Unfortunately, this is often confused with "Open Source Software/Free Software", which is also sometimes abbreviated "OSS/Free".
Even better, I often talk about running something in "UML", or "User-Mode Linux", at work. Until I explained, many people were thinking I was talking about "UML", (I think it's an abbreviation for) "Unified Markup Language". They thought it was amazing I could do all this cool stuff with kernels and isolation using a prototyping & flowcharting language.
When in doubt, use the full name first and the abbreviation later...