Re:I can attest to the overvaluation of producers.
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Cheap Audio Production
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· Score: 1
My email is falsified ^at^ gmx *dot* net. I'll email the tracks I have on this computer to you later tonight or tomorrow.
Re:I can attest to the overvaluation of producers.
on
Cheap Audio Production
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· Score: 1
By CD-quality, I didn't mean that it has the same bitrate, stereo sound, et cetera. It actually sounds a lot like (not exactly, of course, and I mentioned this in my original post) what comes out of a studio. And of course not, these aren't really groundbreaking songs. We're just messing around because we don't have any classes on Tuesday or Thursday.
My original point was that there really ISN'T much of a leap between what we do and what Universal, EMI, etc do. I stand by that.
And yeah, we really do need a better microphone if we want decent vocals and sound, and I know that. But okay, throw in a professional $1000 microphone. Our total costs are still around $1500 before pressing discs.
Re:I can attest to the overvaluation of producers.
on
Cheap Audio Production
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· Score: 1
Allow me to nitpick myself. Yeah, I know that you have to pay for packaging, distribution, and so on, and so that must be factored into the price of a CD. That still doesn't justify the current price of music. Obviously, we have some clue as to how to run the program. However, that knowledge came from an hour of two of fucking around, recording our voices, saying things like "weee I am the king of fucking!" and so on. The point is that we are not professionals and we don't know what ten percent of the features mean on that program (although our knowhow is growing). So, what does the RIAA deserve for a CD? Honestly, I can't imagine total costs and reasonable profit adding up to more than $7 a CD. With artists consistently going gold and platinum (this is excluding foreign sales, mind you), a single gold artist would generate $3.5 million of revenue before touring, merch sales, etc. This model is assuming that CD sales won't rise due to the HUGE decrease in price. (The increase in sales would be a certainty.)
Something interesting is that the RIAA may not back down. It may not be an economic thing anymore. They want to win.
I can attest to the overvaluation of producers.
on
Cheap Audio Production
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· Score: 2, Informative
My friend and I have not even the slightest idea of what to do in order to professionally produce music. Neither of us are serious musicians, and he doesn't really even know how to play guitar. He has a decent, but not great, singing voice, and the same applies to me. Using a cheap (around $9) microphone we bought at Office Max and a stolen (not pirated, stolen, like with my hands) copy of Sound Forge 5.0, we consistently put out mp3s with a $170 acoustic guitar that rivals the sound of something professionally made. Even if we were to buy the software, at $400 we would have paid about $600 in production costs.
Keep in mind we have no idea how to run the program in the first place.
So, why should I have to pay $20 a CD? I realize with more instruments, there would be more work to do, but this really says a lot: Production is overrated.
I've been backing away from idealism lately, but I honestly think that once more and more amateur musicians get these sorts of programs, it will become common knowledge that it honestly is NOTHING to record decent-sounding music. A professional will be able to make the final touches that Jasbir and I could never make. However, even assuming that this person is salaried at $200,000 a year, this DOES NOT JUSTIFY THE PRICE OF MUSIC. End of rant.
Kinda reminds me about a scene in a movie... (Spy Kids 2) where the boy gets a wrist watch that has everything a movie spy ever needs, pushing a button will expand the thing into a massive gargle of everythingness with a sat dish, scanning devices, keyboard, holo projected screen, everything and the kitchensink...
but no time. The inventor comments that he didn't have room to fit in the time on the watch.
My personal experience with Ogg is that it takes forever to rip a CD using the format. I personally don't know why this is (perhaps just a problem with the software I was using?) but if it's going to take 20 minutes to rip three tracks on a 48x CD-ROM drive connected to a 1.8 (don't laugh, it's fast enough for piracy!) gig processor, then I might as well just rip to mp3 at 192 kbps. Storage is cheap as hell nowadays, and most people (myself included) don't need 40 gigs on their hard drive but somehow ended up with it.
If women were/are better equipped to work from the shell? Men are, in general, better with spatial and visual aspects of life, but women are generally better with literary and verbal things. Or are the things that people do with a command prompt too abstract and...not English that a verbal advantage wouldn't matter? Hmm...but then wouldn't women, as superior linguists (I almost typed "cunning linguists" but decided not to risk it) be able to learn the commands and everything better?
Just some seemingly insightful questions for which I have no answer whatsoever.
And of course this type of thing begs the question - do they want to be "wired"?
This got pegged as flamebait, but the comment is an important issue. We assume that these remote villages want to be wired and sit on eBay looking for Every Time I Die t-shirts. Bullshit. They might just want to be villages. We colonized these places under the pretense of modernizing the "heathens". Guess what? They didn't want our help! Additionally, a lot of them were doing just fine. For example, the empire of Mali had the most efficient economy in human history - and treated the laborers with respect relative to everyone else back then. Another example? There's considerable evidence that Africans (yes, the black kind!) reached the Americas around 20,000 BC.
However, I think maybe it's too late. They've already been exposed to "modernity" through our sweatshops and militarism. Maybe we should help in providing one of the few good parts of Western society.
To clarify something...when I said that there can't be any unlicensed p2p within the network, I meant that both users can't be inside the same network sharing an unlicensed file. The admins could prevent that, and realistically, the RIAA would have a decent case for making the admins at least attempt to do so.
However, I think preventing a user inside the network to access Kazaa on the open Internet would be another thing - an unconstitutional act, perhaps, because a government would be exercising prior restraint.
Which leads me to realize another thing. The ISP would basically be the town, if I understand things correctly. Would a spam filter put in place by the town be less constitutional than AOL's fictional filter, or any other ISP's filter? I honestly don't know.
This is great that someone in power has realized what I've realized ever since I got a computer in seventh grade. The Internet is a utility, like electricity or water. It isn't some physical object that you can own or sell.
Having said that, it's a utility like no other. It's the microphone, video camera, post office and infinite Wal-Mart that nobody could have dreamed of twenty years ago. It's a utility that has nothing to do with pure consumption like the water that comes through the faucet. It's a utility of giving and taking.
What better thing could you do for a community, of any size, than to provide what could be described as "the utility of perpetual community"? Let's face it. A networked town would not only strengthen the close ties and "local flavor" that the town surely has, but it would allow every person in that community to more easily access the international community. The residents could then turn around and use everything learned from the international community (maybe this is too idealistic) and, through message boards and town chat rooms, actually discuss these things.
This will almost surely have an impact on local politics. People will be more aware of their local government. "Town hall" meetings popular in small towns could be more realistic because everyone could meet from the convenience of their homes while surfing the web. This is extremely necessary because corruption is an epidemic throughout local government simply because nobody cares.
This has been a rant from a social science major, not a computer science major. Looking at the technical aspects, a few things need to be worked out. First of all, the town will have to find a solution to the inevitable RIAA lawsuit. There can't be any unlicensed p2p within the network. Whether the town would be responsible for not preventing mp3 downloads on the open Internet through this LAN is doubtful. The town could easily say that, without a warrant, they could never do such a thing because it would be a violation of the Fourth Amendment (which it would be, unless I'm missing something from the DMCA or Patriot Act).
Another thing that would be necessary, at least from an advocate of privacy, is a more two-sided TOS. The user will agree not to download illegal material such as warez, child pornography, and so on. The PROVIDER will agree not to monitor or filter any content whatsoever without a warrant or subpoena requiring otherwise. Furthermore, this will need to be demonstrated by the network admins somehow.
It's not necessarily that the British research is done more efficiently or less expensively. It's that the equipment that they build is (probably) built by the British government itself. What this means is that some outside company like Boeing can't come up with some outlandish price for the project. (NASA, of course, accepts the high offer because of the iron triangle that exists. Many former NASA employees work at Boeing and vice-versa.)
If the United States government built its own equipment (Yes, like in SOVIET RUSSIA), then your tax dollars could be spent on getting our best and brightest on Mars, not on fire. I'm sorry that the last sentence was insensitive, but it's true.
He obviously wasn't, which is why he asked the question. There's no need to phrase your "answers" in such a bitchy answer when someone asks an interesting, fairly important question.
http://www.whatbeaverseat.com is a similar website that FOX made just because it was mentioned (in this case, Lisa shows the family the webpage). It even comes with a couple Flash games.
But we won't really see the effects of this new technology until all battery-operated products are replaced with the fuel cell products. Would consumers really want to go through the added expense? Batteries, for the most part, are reasonably priced, and fuel cells aren't exactly perfect. I know I would want to have a fuel cell-powered x, but who else does?
I also wonder if the battery industry might start lobbying Congress like the oil/auto industries do. Or maybe they'll be smart and get in on the innovation themselves. Is there less profit to be made in fuel cells? You don't have to replace them often, which means, as a producer, you don't sell as many.
AMERICANS may have to wait 20 years, if not longer, for cars powered by fuel cells to become a familiar sight. But much smaller forms of fuel cell technology may well power electronic devices like laptop computers, video cameras and cellphones by the end of this decade.
Prototypes of long-lasting fuel cells that can replace batteries are being tested in laboratories in the United States and overseas. "Every big electronics company in the world is working on fuel cells in one way or another," said Jerry Hallmark, manager of Motorola's Energy Technology Lab in Phoenix. Some, like Intel, are going a step further and investing millions of dollars in start-up companies like PolyFuel and Neah Power Systems to accelerate development.
"There are some applications that are getting very close to commercialization," said Mike Lynn, head of a unit at the 3M Company that makes fuel cell components.
Mr. Lynn declined to be more specific, but many analysts expect fuel cells for consumer electronic devices to begin appearing next year in Japan. The betting is that the first to reach the market will be Toshiba, which is demonstrating a prototype of a methanol-powered cell this week at a trade show in Hanover, Germany. Toshiba says the cell could be sold next year with laptops.
Some 200 million to 500 million of the small cells, sometimes called microcells, might be sold annually by 2011, according to Allied Business Intelligence, a market research company in Oyster Bay, N.Y., that tracks new technology. Annual revenue to the fuel cell companies could be as much as $5 billion, said Atakan Ozbek, Allied's director of energy research.
But Mr. Ozbek and others said that despite the momentum of research and development, widespread microcell commercialization is not yet a sure thing.
"People underestimate the complexity of the system, and start-up companies have been cavalier about the availability of all the components they will need," said Dr. Brian M. Barnett, director of the electromechanical systems practice at Tiax, a technology consulting and development company based in Cambridge, Mass.
Like the fuel cells for cars promoted by President Bush and the even larger units being developed to provide electric power to factories and homes, most microcells generate electricity by chemically stripping hydrogen of its electrons. The electrons form a current running outside the cell while the positively charged ions left behind move through the cell. The ions and the electrons are recombined in a reaction with oxygen to form water, the only byproduct if pure hydrogen is used.
The basic concept for fuel cells was discovered in 1839, but researchers differ on the most practical way to design them to generate the most energy in the least space.
Fuel cells run most efficiently on pure hydrogen, but storing hydrogen compactly and safely is a huge hurdle. Many designers of large and small fuel cell systems are trying to get hydrogen from solid compounds that contain hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuels like methanol and ethanol, even though those fuels add other elements like carbon dioxide to the waste stream.
MICROCELLS have several economic advantages over their bigger cousins in the race to commercialization. Energy experts expect to cut the smaller cells' production costs to be competitive with those of batteries long before larger cells can be manufactured at anything close to the cost of internal combustion engines.
It should also be easier and less expensive to persuade retailers to sell fuel cells the size of battery packs than to transform the huge national infrastructure of gasoline stations.
But the biggest reason the smaller cells are expected to become popular sooner is their appeal as a convenience -- something that consumers have shown a willingness to pay for -- and not as an answer to energy and environmental problems.
Fuel cells that last far longer than do rechargeable batteries would free laptop computer users and television camera crews, for example, from the need to lug he
If Jose Padilla was a member of the Taliban, he wasn't part of an army because the Taliban was not the recognized government of Afghanistan (something like three countries saw them as the legit rulers of the country, and we were not one of them). If he was a member of al-Qaeda, he wasn't part of an army because al-Qaeda isn't even close to being the defense of ANY nation. I can't think of any nation that's proud to have an al-Qaeda cell within its borders.
Anyway, the point is that Jose Padilla never met the qualifications to have his citizenship revoked. If he had joined, say, Iraq's army (not fucking likely), then there could be a case.
Seriously. With spam, pop-ups, etc becoming completely out of hand, webhosts and other businesses (and geekier types that are in power and want to destroy overuse of Flash) may want to move to some protocol that has a semi-central control. Not necessarily a censor, but there would be some way of keeping advertising and so forth from reaching a saturation point. I'm not saying this is good or bad, but it may happen. I also conveniently keep myself from providing any ideas as to how this would actually work.
And yes, I realize how weird this sounds, but keep in mind how weird it would have sounded in 1993 that you would use something called the Internet to order pizza in 2003.
More power to you if you can collect the $500, but it's a tough road ahead.
How are any of those steps listed above not worth five hundred American dollars? That sounds like an hour of work at the absolute most (assuming you can find which company created the spam, of course).
Well, the universe will never reach a temperature of absolute zero...and if an infinite period of time passes, the universe will probably be at the same temperature as these rubidium atoms that everyone's talking about. The universe is expanding, but the amount of energy is constant, so there will be less energy for us, if that makes any sense. It'll kind of be like an asymptote in mathematics.
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My email is falsified ^at^ gmx *dot* net. I'll email the tracks I have on this computer to you later tonight or tomorrow.
My original point was that there really ISN'T much of a leap between what we do and what Universal, EMI, etc do. I stand by that.
And yeah, we really do need a better microphone if we want decent vocals and sound, and I know that. But okay, throw in a professional $1000 microphone. Our total costs are still around $1500 before pressing discs.
Yeah, I know that you have to pay for packaging, distribution, and so on, and so that must be factored into the price of a CD. That still doesn't justify the current price of music.
Obviously, we have some clue as to how to run the program. However, that knowledge came from an hour of two of fucking around, recording our voices, saying things like "weee I am the king of fucking!" and so on. The point is that we are not professionals and we don't know what ten percent of the features mean on that program (although our knowhow is growing).
So, what does the RIAA deserve for a CD? Honestly, I can't imagine total costs and reasonable profit adding up to more than $7 a CD. With artists consistently going gold and platinum (this is excluding foreign sales, mind you), a single gold artist would generate $3.5 million of revenue before touring, merch sales, etc. This model is assuming that CD sales won't rise due to the HUGE decrease in price. (The increase in sales would be a certainty.)
Something interesting is that the RIAA may not back down. It may not be an economic thing anymore. They want to win.
Keep in mind we have no idea how to run the program in the first place.
So, why should I have to pay $20 a CD? I realize with more instruments, there would be more work to do, but this really says a lot: Production is overrated.
I've been backing away from idealism lately, but I honestly think that once more and more amateur musicians get these sorts of programs, it will become common knowledge that it honestly is NOTHING to record decent-sounding music. A professional will be able to make the final touches that Jasbir and I could never make. However, even assuming that this person is salaried at $200,000 a year, this DOES NOT JUSTIFY THE PRICE OF MUSIC.
End of rant.
but no time. The inventor comments that he didn't have room to fit in the time on the watch.
So...you watched Spy Kids 2? Awesome.
I had forgotten to mention the word "encode" but it was implied by the subject. Anyway, thanks for the help on the second part.
My personal experience with Ogg is that it takes forever to rip a CD using the format. I personally don't know why this is (perhaps just a problem with the software I was using?) but if it's going to take 20 minutes to rip three tracks on a 48x CD-ROM drive connected to a 1.8 (don't laugh, it's fast enough for piracy!) gig processor, then I might as well just rip to mp3 at 192 kbps. Storage is cheap as hell nowadays, and most people (myself included) don't need 40 gigs on their hard drive but somehow ended up with it.
Just some seemingly insightful questions for which I have no answer whatsoever.
I don't think I've ever seen a bigger argument against the First Amendment in my life.
This technique doesn't involve subpoenas to ISPs to get the identities of p2p users.
This technique doesn't involve scare tactics targeted at network admins.
This technique does not involve arrests, fine, or prison sentences.
This technique does not involve some cockeyed "protection scheme" that renders the product absolutely useless in certain circumstances.
What the fuck do you guys want?
Suuuuure.
This got pegged as flamebait, but the comment is an important issue. We assume that these remote villages want to be wired and sit on eBay looking for Every Time I Die t-shirts. Bullshit. They might just want to be villages. We colonized these places under the pretense of modernizing the "heathens". Guess what? They didn't want our help! Additionally, a lot of them were doing just fine. For example, the empire of Mali had the most efficient economy in human history - and treated the laborers with respect relative to everyone else back then. Another example? There's considerable evidence that Africans (yes, the black kind!) reached the Americas around 20,000 BC.
However, I think maybe it's too late. They've already been exposed to "modernity" through our sweatshops and militarism. Maybe we should help in providing one of the few good parts of Western society.
However, I think preventing a user inside the network to access Kazaa on the open Internet would be another thing - an unconstitutional act, perhaps, because a government would be exercising prior restraint.
Which leads me to realize another thing. The ISP would basically be the town, if I understand things correctly. Would a spam filter put in place by the town be less constitutional than AOL's fictional filter, or any other ISP's filter? I honestly don't know.
Again, good luck!
Having said that, it's a utility like no other. It's the microphone, video camera, post office and infinite Wal-Mart that nobody could have dreamed of twenty years ago. It's a utility that has nothing to do with pure consumption like the water that comes through the faucet. It's a utility of giving and taking.
What better thing could you do for a community, of any size, than to provide what could be described as "the utility of perpetual community"? Let's face it. A networked town would not only strengthen the close ties and "local flavor" that the town surely has, but it would allow every person in that community to more easily access the international community. The residents could then turn around and use everything learned from the international community (maybe this is too idealistic) and, through message boards and town chat rooms, actually discuss these things.
This will almost surely have an impact on local politics. People will be more aware of their local government. "Town hall" meetings popular in small towns could be more realistic because everyone could meet from the convenience of their homes while surfing the web. This is extremely necessary because corruption is an epidemic throughout local government simply because nobody cares.
This has been a rant from a social science major, not a computer science major. Looking at the technical aspects, a few things need to be worked out. First of all, the town will have to find a solution to the inevitable RIAA lawsuit. There can't be any unlicensed p2p within the network. Whether the town would be responsible for not preventing mp3 downloads on the open Internet through this LAN is doubtful. The town could easily say that, without a warrant, they could never do such a thing because it would be a violation of the Fourth Amendment (which it would be, unless I'm missing something from the DMCA or Patriot Act).
Another thing that would be necessary, at least from an advocate of privacy, is a more two-sided TOS. The user will agree not to download illegal material such as warez, child pornography, and so on. The PROVIDER will agree not to monitor or filter any content whatsoever without a warrant or subpoena requiring otherwise. Furthermore, this will need to be demonstrated by the network admins somehow.
Anyway, good luck with this thing!
It's not necessarily that the British research is done more efficiently or less expensively. It's that the equipment that they build is (probably) built by the British government itself.
What this means is that some outside company like Boeing can't come up with some outlandish price for the project. (NASA, of course, accepts the high offer because of the iron triangle that exists. Many former NASA employees work at Boeing and vice-versa.)
If the United States government built its own equipment (Yes, like in SOVIET RUSSIA), then your tax dollars could be spent on getting our best and brightest on Mars, not on fire. I'm sorry that the last sentence was insensitive, but it's true.
Jesus Christ.
Look at us.
Some of us have PhDs. Not me though. Contra RULES!
http://www.whatbeaverseat.com is a similar website that FOX made just because it was mentioned (in this case, Lisa shows the family the webpage). It even comes with a couple Flash games.
I also wonder if the battery industry might start lobbying Congress like the oil/auto industries do. Or maybe they'll be smart and get in on the innovation themselves. Is there less profit to be made in fuel cells? You don't have to replace them often, which means, as a producer, you don't sell as many.
AMERICANS may have to wait 20 years, if not longer, for cars powered by fuel cells to become a familiar sight. But much smaller forms of fuel cell technology may well power electronic devices like laptop computers, video cameras and cellphones by the end of this decade.
Prototypes of long-lasting fuel cells that can replace batteries are being tested in laboratories in the United States and overseas. "Every big electronics company in the world is working on fuel cells in one way or another," said Jerry Hallmark, manager of Motorola's Energy Technology Lab in Phoenix. Some, like Intel, are going a step further and investing millions of dollars in start-up companies like PolyFuel and Neah Power Systems to accelerate development.
"There are some applications that are getting very close to commercialization," said Mike Lynn, head of a unit at the 3M Company that makes fuel cell components.
Mr. Lynn declined to be more specific, but many analysts expect fuel cells for consumer electronic devices to begin appearing next year in Japan. The betting is that the first to reach the market will be Toshiba, which is demonstrating a prototype of a methanol-powered cell this week at a trade show in Hanover, Germany. Toshiba says the cell could be sold next year with laptops.
Some 200 million to 500 million of the small cells, sometimes called microcells, might be sold annually by 2011, according to Allied Business Intelligence, a market research company in Oyster Bay, N.Y., that tracks new technology. Annual revenue to the fuel cell companies could be as much as $5 billion, said Atakan Ozbek, Allied's director of energy research.
But Mr. Ozbek and others said that despite the momentum of research and development, widespread microcell commercialization is not yet a sure thing.
"People underestimate the complexity of the system, and start-up companies have been cavalier about the availability of all the components they will need," said Dr. Brian M. Barnett, director of the electromechanical systems practice at Tiax, a technology consulting and development company based in Cambridge, Mass.
Like the fuel cells for cars promoted by President Bush and the even larger units being developed to provide electric power to factories and homes, most microcells generate electricity by chemically stripping hydrogen of its electrons. The electrons form a current running outside the cell while the positively charged ions left behind move through the cell. The ions and the electrons are recombined in a reaction with oxygen to form water, the only byproduct if pure hydrogen is used.
The basic concept for fuel cells was discovered in 1839, but researchers differ on the most practical way to design them to generate the most energy in the least space.
Fuel cells run most efficiently on pure hydrogen, but storing hydrogen compactly and safely is a huge hurdle. Many designers of large and small fuel cell systems are trying to get hydrogen from solid compounds that contain hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuels like methanol and ethanol, even though those fuels add other elements like carbon dioxide to the waste stream.
MICROCELLS have several economic advantages over their bigger cousins in the race to commercialization. Energy experts expect to cut the smaller cells' production costs to be competitive with those of batteries long before larger cells can be manufactured at anything close to the cost of internal combustion engines.
It should also be easier and less expensive to persuade retailers to sell fuel cells the size of battery packs than to transform the huge national infrastructure of gasoline stations.
But the biggest reason the smaller cells are expected to become popular sooner is their appeal as a convenience -- something that consumers have shown a willingness to pay for -- and not as an answer to energy and environmental problems.
Fuel cells that last far longer than do rechargeable batteries would free laptop computer users and television camera crews, for example, from the need to lug he
Anyway, the point is that Jose Padilla never met the qualifications to have his citizenship revoked. If he had joined, say, Iraq's army (not fucking likely), then there could be a case.
And yes, I realize how weird this sounds, but keep in mind how weird it would have sounded in 1993 that you would use something called the Internet to order pizza in 2003.
More power to you if you can collect the $500, but it's a tough road ahead.
How are any of those steps listed above not worth five hundred American dollars? That sounds like an hour of work at the absolute most (assuming you can find which company created the spam, of course).
Bill Gate$$$$$$$$$$$$ suxx0rzz $$$ $.
If you're going to overdo something, overdo it right.
Well, the universe will never reach a temperature of absolute zero...and if an infinite period of time passes, the universe will probably be at the same temperature as these rubidium atoms that everyone's talking about. The universe is expanding, but the amount of energy is constant, so there will be less energy for us, if that makes any sense. It'll kind of be like an asymptote in mathematics.