A while back I read that one of Google's founders said that click fraud is the greatest threat to google's business. This is because Black Hats publish websites with AdSense, then fraudulently click the ads on their own pages. They get paid by Google, and the merchants who placed the ads through AdWords Select pay for the fraudulent clicks, but don't enjoy the increased sales that advertising can bring.
You could really help me out if you shared my music on the Internet.
If you play piano, there's sheet music available for two of my songs, with the rest coming sometime soon.
It's all completely legal to share, as it has a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. You can create derivative works such as remixes, and even sell my work or perform it in front of a paying crowd, but you must share alike - that is, give your derivative works the same license.
Why am I doing this? I am studying both piano and music theory with the aim of going back to school someday to major in musical composition. I want to compose symphonies.
I'll be in my fifties by the time I graduate - I can't afford to spend years building up a fan base. So when your local symphony orchestra plays my work, I want there to already be a loyal fan base in your city.
I remember a while back Apple got a lot of criticism from the European Community because the iTMS DRM didn't work on competing players - that's probably one reason Jobs pressed the record labels to let him offer DRM-free music.
I'd like to see some legal type make the case that Apple has a monopoly on portable music players, and that this is an illegally anticompetitive action.
I don't think she ever wore braids. And she's from Canada, not India.
We've met a few other Bonitas. Surprisingly, although it means "pretty" in Spanish, none of them were hispanic. She was told on a visit to Spain that no one there would give their daughter that name.
My future wife Bonita first emailed me back in 1997 to say she liked my website. We began to correspond regularly, and after a month or so I worked up the nerve to ask for her phone number.
After a couple months of regular phone calls, eventually reaching several hours a day, I rather impulsively blurted out that I was attracted to her. A few days later she said she was attracted to me too.
I offered to send her a plane ticket to come visit. At the time she lived in Nova Scotia, Canada and I lived in California. However, wiser heads prevailed: her friends all recommended to her that I visit her first, so they all could check me out and make sure I wasn't an ax murder.
I guess I checked out OK, and several visits to each others' homes - and to each others' parents - followed.
This was before Voice Over IP worked very well; I'm afraid Speak Freely didn't work for us, so I paid some astounding phone bills.
She came to live with me in California, able to work in the States because the biotech job she found qualified her for a TN-1 visa.
We moved back to eastern Canada for our wedding, which took place on July 22nd, 2000.
... players. Unlike MP3, which has a free license for players, once has to pay a per-unit patent license for MPEG-4 players.
May I suggest the un-patent-encumbered Theora instead?
I know what I'm talking about, as I'd like to support MPEG-4 audio in Ogg Frog - MPEG-4 is also known as AAC, the Apple iTunes "native" format. I've researched it, and I can't support it because I live in the US, which recognizes software patents.
There's also problems with Java apps not being compatible with certain runtimes, despite the "write once, run anywhere" claim.
A minimal java app plus runtime download is tens of megabytes. A minimal zoolib download, which requires no runtime, is a half meg or so, and, once most of ZooLib's codebase is linked in, grows very slowly as new functionality is added to the app.
... framework. There are a variety available, which share the property that one need only write one set of cross-platform sources, that can be compiled native to any of the supported platforms and linked with the library.
Besides the more well-known wxWidgets and Qt, there is also ZooLib, which is written in C++ and has the MIT license.
I've been a ZooLib developer for seven years, and think it's the best thing since sliced bread. I'm using it to build Ogg Frog, a Free (GPL) audio application. One reason for using ZooLib is that it still supports the Classic Mac OS, even 68k CPUs.
I read recently that some music hosting sites, including for a time MySpace, have terms of service that give them rights over a musician's music that no sensible musician would agree to, for example the right to create derivative works and to use the music commercially.
What that means is that starving musicians could upload their work to a music hosting service, only to find that the site ends up selling CDs of their music, or licensing it for advertising jingles.
MySpace's TOS were this way until someone there organized a big protest. Let me find a link... ah, here we go - videos at YouTube too. And I quote:
"...by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business... in any media formats and through any media channels."
Among other things, this means they could strip the audio portion of any track and sell it on a CD. Or, they could sell your video to an ad firm looking to get "edgy"; suddenly your indie reggae tune could be the soundtrack to a new ad for SUVs. The sky's still the limit, when it comes to the rights you surrender to YouTube when you upload your video. Perhaps even scarier is the idea that anyone who might eventually buy YouTube would automatically obtain these same rights. Since YouTube is so popular, with 100 million videos shown each day, it's an attractive acquisition target for any number of companies.
Now, knowing the sort of folks that post their creations on sites like MySpace and YouTube, how many of them are likely to have even read the terms of service, let alone thought through their consequences?
Remember the Watergate scandal? Sent a bunch of people to prison and led to President Nixon's resignation? He would have been prosecuted had Gerald Ford not pardoned him.
The five gentlemen who were busted after an alert security guard noticed several locks tape down were installing wiretaps in the Democratic National Commitee's headquarters during the '72 presidential election.
How low-tech! They actually had to go attach wires to physical telephones!
Now, I'm not saying that this newfangled system would really be used to affect the outcome of the '98 election, but if it were done, it would be undetectable. No amount of alert security guards would catch the perpetrators.
I'm old enough to have lived through Watergate; the whole nation was in crisis.
Humphrey has written quite a few books on software engineering and management, and you would do well to read the lot of them. However, most software engineers would probably find his methodology too formal, as most programmers I know prefer a loose, casual working style. But there's no doubt that the SEI's methods are worthwhile when quality and reliability is important.
Also, before buying any technical book, check to see if the Associaton of C and C++ Users has reviewed it - try typing "management" into the search for their. (I'm afraid their book review server is down just now but I expect it will be back up soon.)
The ACCU makes a point of reviewing books that they suspect might be stinkers, so they can write reviews that warn you away from books that suck.
My seed goes down now and then too, although when I check the process is still alive. I haven't tried to debug it, I just kill it and restart the process.
I use btdownloadmany.py for my seeds. It's a Python script. What happens is that after running for a week or two, it just stops responding. It doesn't crash, it just doesn't show up when my BitTorrent client tries to download.
I plan to remedy this by running a second and possibly a third downloader at different virtual hosts. I just haven't gotten to it yet.
What I'd really like is some kind of automated monitoring software that would alert me immediately when either my tracker or my seed - and only my seed, not someone else's - goes down. But that is an itch that is as yet unscratched. The way I monitor my torrents is by running the BT GUI on my laptop now and then.
There is already widespread software available in Linux and BSD distros, and I'm sure in commercially-manufactured routers as well, to manage the quality of service of network traffic. I would have no problem at all with an ISP throttling my torrent traffic to a modest bandwidth per user. The fact that they don't do that suggests that the reason they're blocking is not just because of the load on their network.
I operate a torrent tracker and full-time seed for some Creative Commons music downloads. These torrents are perfectly legal and posted with the permission of the copyright holder. (It's just my music, but there will be more from other artists soon.) Other legal torrent sites are Legaltorrents.com, Jamendo and bt.etree.org.
Also many Free and Open Source software projects distribute installers via BitTorrent, notably Ubuntu Linux and OpenOffice.org.
All of these torrents are completely legal. Yet many ISPs block BitTorrent traffic - that happened to me with Eastlink back in Nova Scotia. I was therefore unable to check that my own torrents were operating properly! One can try to work around such blockage by using non-standard port numbers, but I understand that it's possible for ISPs to filter based on the content of packets, and not just the port numbers.
I can see the day coming when all peer-to-peer traffic, whether legal or not, is blocked either due to new laws or record and movie industry lawsuits. All of us who have free content and software to distribute will lose out.
Those of us who offer legal files via peer-to-peer networks - not just BitTorrent, as Jamendo also offers eMule - need to work together to lobby both national governments and local ISPs to do away with this filtering. There are many ways to download both music and software that are perfectly legal; we need to dispel the myth that free downloads are somehow necessarily violating the law.
I was working for a Windows shop a while back, and there was a Microsoft road show coming to town showing off Visual Studio 2005 and the new SQL Server. The boss wanted us all to go, but to attend we had to register at some Microsoft web page.
Part of the registration process was that I was required to get a Passport ID. I felt like I'd just sold my soul to The Devil just to get a paycheck.
I've been a software engineer for twenty years, and I'm sick to death of it. But I have always had a great love of music - I taught myself to play piano by ear starting back in 1984, and learned to improvise. I composed several songs by improvising, and with the help of a pro audio friend, recorded them back in '94.
But at the time all I could do to distribute my music was to manually duplicate cassette tapes. I just gave a few to friends and family. CD burners were still horrendously expensive, as were CD-R blanks.
When I got my own website, I offered some free downloads in Sun's old.AU format. I think it's 8-bit, so it didn't sound that good, and the downloads were quite large. But MP3 and psychoacoustic compression was still a ways off.
The copyright on my music said "All rights reserved" at first, and I specifically forbid sharing my songs over the Internet, but instead requested that those who wanted to share my music direct others to my website.
But I had always been a big fan of Richard Stallman and Free Software, and I knew that the right thing to do would be to copyleft my music.
I'm not signed with any record label, not even an indie one. I'm completely on my own. But my music gets downloaded by hundreds of people each month, with the downloads growing over time.
By learning to play by ear, I didn't learn to read sheet music. But for several years now I've been taking piano lessons and learning to read music, with the aim that when I can pass the entrance audition, I will enroll in music school to major in musical composition. I want to compose symphonies someday.
The Internet is, frankly, a miracle to me as it is enabling people throughout the world to get to know me and my music. When the time comes that I play professionally - or hopefully, symphony orchestras play myy compositions - I expect that there will already be a base of fans who will buy tickets to my performances.
I call it "The Rough Draft" because I always intended to compose more pieces for at, and when the time came, to re-record it and to have a "glass master" CD pressed.
The lot of it is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license. There are various formats as well as sheet music in PDF and Lilypond (source code) format. (I would be honored if any of you learned to play my music.)
I've been playing at Open Mics for a couple years now. I recently moved to Silicon Valley, and often visit Santa Cruz on the weekends. If you'd like to hear me live, check my live performance schedule. (It presently says I'm in Vancouver, but I'll update that in the next day or so.)
I'm also planning to buy an amp so I can play my keyboard on the street. When I do, I'm going to have a sign hanging off of it advertising "Free Music Downloads", and will have a box of my free music download handbills.
Last weekend I spent four hours walking up and down Santa Cruz' Pacific Garden Mall passing out the handbills. I got many reactions - most people think it's too good to be true, that there is some kind of catch, but most who accept the handbill are quite delighted.
You could really help me out if you shared my music over the Internet.
While one can't make a GPL MP3 encoder in a country like the US that recognizes software patents, one can make a decoder, so there are lots of Free and Open Source MP3 players.
But the AAC patent license terms don't even permit players without a licensing fee. This is a significant obstacle for a GPL program I'm working on called Ogg Frog.
You will surely raise an objection by giving the examples of VLC Media Player, which supports AAC, and the lame MP3 encoder and faad/faac AAC decoder/encoder. But VLC is from France, which has no software patents, and lame, faad and faac are distributed in source code form only, which doesn't infringe the patent.
As far as I know, it's illegal for people in the US to download and use VLC without paying a license fee to the patent holders.
It will be like that first breath of fresh air after you quit smoking.
Look for music with the Creative Commons seal of approval. There are Creative Commons search engines, in which you can specify whether you want music you can use commercially, or whether you can create derivative works.
If you like piano, there is my humble offerring, in a variety of audio formats as well as sheet music. I chose to place my music under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license, not just to "eat my own dog food", but because I feel that doing so helps me to advance my music aspirations:
I am weary of my twenty-year career as a software engineer. I need a change. That's why I'm taking piano lessons with the aim of passing the music school entrance audition someday. I'm going to major in musical composition; I want to learn to compose symphonies.
And the lot of my compositions are going to be CC-SA licensed.
I have already found that doing this encourages more people to get to know my music. Now, I know I'm not a pop artist - in fact most people don't like my music, but many do. By giving away my music I'm building a base of fans who will buy tickets to my live concerts some day.
This last weekend I spent four hours in downtown Santa Cruz, California, walking up and down Pacific Avenue passing out handbills that advertise my downloads. On the back is the Creative Commons logo and an encouragement for the recipient to share my music over the Internet and to burn CDs for their friends. I think I gave out over a hundred handbills, and left stacks of them on the counters in two record stores and a musical instrument store.
It's funny, the reactions I get from some people. Many believe that this is too good to be true, that there is some kind of catch, or that I'm trying to sell them something, or indoctrinate them into some kind of cult.
Well, sort of: the Cult of Copyleft.
I made a couple of new friends as I did this, one of them a "Downtown Host" and the other a street musician who plays the guitar.
I also burn CDs of my music to give away. I have a CD label printer that's just a regular inkjet printer with a feed mechanism for CDs. In this way I can make CDs a few at a time, and inexpensively, yet that look professional.
I try to always carry some in my backpack to give to new friends. I also give them to any street musicians that I come across, as a way of introducing myself to the local music community.
I'll give you a CD too - autographed even - if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area or in Santa Cruz County. Just email me at michael@geometricvisions.com and meet me somewhere for coffee or a beer, and I'll bring your CD with me.
It's hard for politicians that support copyright reform to raise the money they need to conduct their re-election campaigns. Hollywood pours a lot of money into the coffers of politicians who are then only too happy to pass draconian bills.
I just started a very good job; before long, I plan to be using some of my newfound salary to donate myself.
... where, at one time at least, discoveries were freely shared through publication in peer-reviewed journals. The way of academia was supposed to be that knowledge was free for all.
This lead to my belief that copyright should be strictly limited (in the piece I link to in the grandparent, I conclude that the original term of fourteen years would be best), and further the decision to place my music under Creative Commons.
Unfortunately, the academic world I grew up believing in no longer really exists; Universities patent their professors' inventions, and University researches do contract work for private industry under non-disclosure. It's a damn shame.
I have a mental illness called schizoaffective disorder. It's just like being schizophrenic and manic depressive at the same time.
A while back I was taking a fairly high dose of the antipsychotic Risperdal, and it was giving me symptoms of tardive dyskinesia, a form of brain damage which causes repetitive motions. In my case it was involuntary mouth movements, as if I was chewing gum, but at its worst it can put you in a wheelchair.
My doctor wanted me to be the first at the mental health clinic to try Risperdal Consta. Rather than tablets taken each day, R.C. is injected once every two weeks.
How does this work? A two-week dose would normally be an overdose. But the risperidone in Risperdal Consta is encapsulated in nano-spheres that gradually dissolve in the blood, releasing the medicine. There are different grades of the capsules, so some dissolve the first day, some the next and so on.
His main reason for asking me to try it is that it requires a much lower effective dose, I think because conventional Risperdal is partially digested, diminishing its potency so you need a higher dose.
I balked at it when he told me it would cost a thousand dollars a month or so, but he said that the clinic had a fund to pay for its patients' medicine - this was in The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan.
The main reason Consta was developed though was for medication compliance. Many of those who take Risperdal suffer so much from their illnesses that they either don't remember to take it, or their paranoia leads them to believe their medicine is poison.
Because the Consta only needs to be injected every two weeks, once the injection is given, you can be sure that the patient is medicated for the two weeks.
I told my doctor that to use it on me would be an awful waste of taxpayer money, and that the Consta instead should be used on someone for whom it would keep them out of the hospital, that is, someone who on conventional Risperdal would be non-compliant.
(I have sinced switched to Zyprexa, which is more effective for me than Risperdal, so a lower dose works. I don't have the T.D. symptoms anymore.)
From time to time they need to cut and re-weld the vacuum beam pipe in the CERN particle accellerator. This can leave iron filings in the tube that could screw up the beam. I was told when I spent the Summer of '93 there that the way they clean the pipe out is to attach a brush to the tail of a weasel and have him run down the tube.
And while offtopic, definitely funny is that one time after they'd sealed the tube back up, they couldn't get the beam to go through a particular section. Investigators found a couple beer bottles spaced several meters apart inside the tube.
OSX uses more RAM than there is any possible justification for, and I don't mean for buffers.
It is said that the reason Apple chose NeXT for its modern operating system, and not the BeOS, is that the BeOS was so efficient that its users wouldn't have to buy new hardware to run it. How would Apple make any money off that?
The BeOS was snappy and responsive on my 150 MHz PowerPC 604 (not 604e, even) PowerMac 8500.
While OS X didn't support that model, there is an Open Source installer called XPostFacto that does allow OS X installs on the 8500. I was quite dismayed to find it so slow as to be unusable.
My 1.83 GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro is the first hardware I've owned that runs OS X at what I consider acceptable speeds - that is, once I added another Gig of RAM, I find the UI responsive enough that it doesn't drag behind my input.
Now, there are some nice architectural features to be found in Objective-C, Cocoa, Core Graphics and the other stuff in Mac OS X. Maybe four or five years from now, when the hardware can handle it, it will turn out to be of real benefit to the users. But from time to time I boot Mac OS 9 on my 400 MHz Blue and White G3 that normally runs OS X, and when I do, I'm always impressed with how fast it is.
Slashdot Mirror
If you play piano, there's sheet music available for two of my songs, with the rest coming sometime soon.
It's all completely legal to share, as it has a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. You can create derivative works such as remixes, and even sell my work or perform it in front of a paying crowd, but you must share alike - that is, give your derivative works the same license.
Why am I doing this? I am studying both piano and music theory with the aim of going back to school someday to major in musical composition. I want to compose symphonies.
I'll be in my fifties by the time I graduate - I can't afford to spend years building up a fan base. So when your local symphony orchestra plays my work, I want there to already be a loyal fan base in your city.
Thanks for your help!
I'd like to see some legal type make the case that Apple has a monopoly on portable music players, and that this is an illegally anticompetitive action.
We've met a few other Bonitas. Surprisingly, although it means "pretty" in Spanish, none of them were hispanic. She was told on a visit to Spain that no one there would give their daughter that name.
After a couple months of regular phone calls, eventually reaching several hours a day, I rather impulsively blurted out that I was attracted to her. A few days later she said she was attracted to me too.
I offered to send her a plane ticket to come visit. At the time she lived in Nova Scotia, Canada and I lived in California. However, wiser heads prevailed: her friends all recommended to her that I visit her first, so they all could check me out and make sure I wasn't an ax murder.
I guess I checked out OK, and several visits to each others' homes - and to each others' parents - followed.
This was before Voice Over IP worked very well; I'm afraid Speak Freely didn't work for us, so I paid some astounding phone bills.
She came to live with me in California, able to work in the States because the biotech job she found qualified her for a TN-1 visa.
We moved back to eastern Canada for our wedding, which took place on July 22nd, 2000.
We've been married for seven years now.
May I suggest the un-patent-encumbered Theora instead?
I know what I'm talking about, as I'd like to support MPEG-4 audio in Ogg Frog - MPEG-4 is also known as AAC, the Apple iTunes "native" format. I've researched it, and I can't support it because I live in the US, which recognizes software patents.
A minimal java app plus runtime download is tens of megabytes. A minimal zoolib download, which requires no runtime, is a half meg or so, and, once most of ZooLib's codebase is linked in, grows very slowly as new functionality is added to the app.
Besides the more well-known wxWidgets and Qt, there is also ZooLib, which is written in C++ and has the MIT license.
I've been a ZooLib developer for seven years, and think it's the best thing since sliced bread. I'm using it to build Ogg Frog, a Free (GPL) audio application. One reason for using ZooLib is that it still supports the Classic Mac OS, even 68k CPUs.
What that means is that starving musicians could upload their work to a music hosting service, only to find that the site ends up selling CDs of their music, or licensing it for advertising jingles.
MySpace's TOS were this way until someone there organized a big protest. Let me find a link... ah, here we go - videos at YouTube too. And I quote:
Now, knowing the sort of folks that post their creations on sites like MySpace and YouTube, how many of them are likely to have even read the terms of service, let alone thought through their consequences?The five gentlemen who were busted after an alert security guard noticed several locks tape down were installing wiretaps in the Democratic National Commitee's headquarters during the '72 presidential election.
How low-tech! They actually had to go attach wires to physical telephones!
Now, I'm not saying that this newfangled system would really be used to affect the outcome of the '98 election, but if it were done, it would be undetectable. No amount of alert security guards would catch the perpetrators.
I'm old enough to have lived through Watergate; the whole nation was in crisis.
Humphrey has written quite a few books on software engineering and management, and you would do well to read the lot of them. However, most software engineers would probably find his methodology too formal, as most programmers I know prefer a loose, casual working style. But there's no doubt that the SEI's methods are worthwhile when quality and reliability is important.
Also, before buying any technical book, check to see if the Associaton of C and C++ Users has reviewed it - try typing "management" into the search for their. (I'm afraid their book review server is down just now but I expect it will be back up soon.)
The ACCU makes a point of reviewing books that they suspect might be stinkers, so they can write reviews that warn you away from books that suck.
I use btdownloadmany.py for my seeds. It's a Python script. What happens is that after running for a week or two, it just stops responding. It doesn't crash, it just doesn't show up when my BitTorrent client tries to download.
I plan to remedy this by running a second and possibly a third downloader at different virtual hosts. I just haven't gotten to it yet.
What I'd really like is some kind of automated monitoring software that would alert me immediately when either my tracker or my seed - and only my seed, not someone else's - goes down. But that is an itch that is as yet unscratched. The way I monitor my torrents is by running the BT GUI on my laptop now and then.
Also many Free and Open Source software projects distribute installers via BitTorrent, notably Ubuntu Linux and OpenOffice.org.
All of these torrents are completely legal. Yet many ISPs block BitTorrent traffic - that happened to me with Eastlink back in Nova Scotia. I was therefore unable to check that my own torrents were operating properly! One can try to work around such blockage by using non-standard port numbers, but I understand that it's possible for ISPs to filter based on the content of packets, and not just the port numbers.
I can see the day coming when all peer-to-peer traffic, whether legal or not, is blocked either due to new laws or record and movie industry lawsuits. All of us who have free content and software to distribute will lose out.
Those of us who offer legal files via peer-to-peer networks - not just BitTorrent, as Jamendo also offers eMule - need to work together to lobby both national governments and local ISPs to do away with this filtering. There are many ways to download both music and software that are perfectly legal; we need to dispel the myth that free downloads are somehow necessarily violating the law.
Part of the registration process was that I was required to get a Passport ID. I felt like I'd just sold my soul to The Devil just to get a paycheck.
But at the time all I could do to distribute my music was to manually duplicate cassette tapes. I just gave a few to friends and family. CD burners were still horrendously expensive, as were CD-R blanks.
When I got my own website, I offered some free downloads in Sun's old .AU format. I think it's 8-bit, so it didn't sound that good, and the downloads were quite large. But MP3 and psychoacoustic compression was still a ways off.
The copyright on my music said "All rights reserved" at first, and I specifically forbid sharing my songs over the Internet, but instead requested that those who wanted to share my music direct others to my website.
But I had always been a big fan of Richard Stallman and Free Software, and I knew that the right thing to do would be to copyleft my music.
I'm not signed with any record label, not even an indie one. I'm completely on my own. But my music gets downloaded by hundreds of people each month, with the downloads growing over time.
By learning to play by ear, I didn't learn to read sheet music. But for several years now I've been taking piano lessons and learning to read music, with the aim that when I can pass the entrance audition, I will enroll in music school to major in musical composition. I want to compose symphonies someday.
The Internet is, frankly, a miracle to me as it is enabling people throughout the world to get to know me and my music. When the time comes that I play professionally - or hopefully, symphony orchestras play myy compositions - I expect that there will already be a base of fans who will buy tickets to my performances.
Please download, share and enjoy:
- Geometric Visions: The Rough Draft
I call it "The Rough Draft" because I always intended to compose more pieces for at, and when the time came, to re-record it and to have a "glass master" CD pressed.The lot of it is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license. There are various formats as well as sheet music in PDF and Lilypond (source code) format. (I would be honored if any of you learned to play my music.)
I've been playing at Open Mics for a couple years now. I recently moved to Silicon Valley, and often visit Santa Cruz on the weekends. If you'd like to hear me live, check my live performance schedule. (It presently says I'm in Vancouver, but I'll update that in the next day or so.)
I'm also planning to buy an amp so I can play my keyboard on the street. When I do, I'm going to have a sign hanging off of it advertising "Free Music Downloads", and will have a box of my free music download handbills.
Last weekend I spent four hours walking up and down Santa Cruz' Pacific Garden Mall passing out the handbills. I got many reactions - most people think it's too good to be true, that there is some kind of catch, but most who accept the handbill are quite delighted.
You could really help me out if you shared my music over the Internet.
But the AAC patent license terms don't even permit players without a licensing fee. This is a significant obstacle for a GPL program I'm working on called Ogg Frog.
You will surely raise an objection by giving the examples of VLC Media Player, which supports AAC, and the lame MP3 encoder and faad/faac AAC decoder/encoder. But VLC is from France, which has no software patents, and lame, faad and faac are distributed in source code form only, which doesn't infringe the patent.
As far as I know, it's illegal for people in the US to download and use VLC without paying a license fee to the patent holders.
Look for music with the Creative Commons seal of approval. There are Creative Commons search engines, in which you can specify whether you want music you can use commercially, or whether you can create derivative works.
There is also the Common Content Catalog, which has a Music Section.
If you like piano, there is my humble offerring, in a variety of audio formats as well as sheet music. I chose to place my music under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license, not just to "eat my own dog food", but because I feel that doing so helps me to advance my music aspirations:
I am weary of my twenty-year career as a software engineer. I need a change. That's why I'm taking piano lessons with the aim of passing the music school entrance audition someday. I'm going to major in musical composition; I want to learn to compose symphonies.
And the lot of my compositions are going to be CC-SA licensed.
I have already found that doing this encourages more people to get to know my music. Now, I know I'm not a pop artist - in fact most people don't like my music, but many do. By giving away my music I'm building a base of fans who will buy tickets to my live concerts some day.
This last weekend I spent four hours in downtown Santa Cruz, California, walking up and down Pacific Avenue passing out handbills that advertise my downloads. On the back is the Creative Commons logo and an encouragement for the recipient to share my music over the Internet and to burn CDs for their friends. I think I gave out over a hundred handbills, and left stacks of them on the counters in two record stores and a musical instrument store.
It's funny, the reactions I get from some people. Many believe that this is too good to be true, that there is some kind of catch, or that I'm trying to sell them something, or indoctrinate them into some kind of cult.
Well, sort of: the Cult of Copyleft.
I made a couple of new friends as I did this, one of them a "Downtown Host" and the other a street musician who plays the guitar.
I also burn CDs of my music to give away. I have a CD label printer that's just a regular inkjet printer with a feed mechanism for CDs. In this way I can make CDs a few at a time, and inexpensively, yet that look professional.
I try to always carry some in my backpack to give to new friends. I also give them to any street musicians that I come across, as a way of introducing myself to the local music community.
I'll give you a CD too - autographed even - if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area or in Santa Cruz County. Just email me at michael@geometricvisions.com and meet me somewhere for coffee or a beer, and I'll bring your CD with me.
I just started a very good job; before long, I plan to be using some of my newfound salary to donate myself.
This lead to my belief that copyright should be strictly limited (in the piece I link to in the grandparent, I conclude that the original term of fourteen years would be best), and further the decision to place my music under Creative Commons.
Unfortunately, the academic world I grew up believing in no longer really exists; Universities patent their professors' inventions, and University researches do contract work for private industry under non-disclosure. It's a damn shame.
A while back I was taking a fairly high dose of the antipsychotic Risperdal, and it was giving me symptoms of tardive dyskinesia, a form of brain damage which causes repetitive motions. In my case it was involuntary mouth movements, as if I was chewing gum, but at its worst it can put you in a wheelchair.
My doctor wanted me to be the first at the mental health clinic to try Risperdal Consta. Rather than tablets taken each day, R.C. is injected once every two weeks.
How does this work? A two-week dose would normally be an overdose. But the risperidone in Risperdal Consta is encapsulated in nano-spheres that gradually dissolve in the blood, releasing the medicine. There are different grades of the capsules, so some dissolve the first day, some the next and so on.
His main reason for asking me to try it is that it requires a much lower effective dose, I think because conventional Risperdal is partially digested, diminishing its potency so you need a higher dose.
I balked at it when he told me it would cost a thousand dollars a month or so, but he said that the clinic had a fund to pay for its patients' medicine - this was in The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan.
The main reason Consta was developed though was for medication compliance. Many of those who take Risperdal suffer so much from their illnesses that they either don't remember to take it, or their paranoia leads them to believe their medicine is poison.
Because the Consta only needs to be injected every two weeks, once the injection is given, you can be sure that the patient is medicated for the two weeks.
I told my doctor that to use it on me would be an awful waste of taxpayer money, and that the Consta instead should be used on someone for whom it would keep them out of the hospital, that is, someone who on conventional Risperdal would be non-compliant.
(I have sinced switched to Zyprexa, which is more effective for me than Risperdal, so a lower dose works. I don't have the T.D. symptoms anymore.)
And while offtopic, definitely funny is that one time after they'd sealed the tube back up, they couldn't get the beam to go through a particular section. Investigators found a couple beer bottles spaced several meters apart inside the tube.
The BeOS was snappy and responsive on my 150 MHz PowerPC 604 (not 604e, even) PowerMac 8500.
While OS X didn't support that model, there is an Open Source installer called XPostFacto that does allow OS X installs on the 8500. I was quite dismayed to find it so slow as to be unusable.
My 1.83 GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro is the first hardware I've owned that runs OS X at what I consider acceptable speeds - that is, once I added another Gig of RAM, I find the UI responsive enough that it doesn't drag behind my input.
Now, there are some nice architectural features to be found in Objective-C, Cocoa, Core Graphics and the other stuff in Mac OS X. Maybe four or five years from now, when the hardware can handle it, it will turn out to be of real benefit to the users. But from time to time I boot Mac OS 9 on my 400 MHz Blue and White G3 that normally runs OS X, and when I do, I'm always impressed with how fast it is.