I think the problem lies in the fact that computing software and hardware has basically solved the processing needs of most businesses from a computational perspective. Spreadsheets, word processing, and encrypting information are all most businesses really want that are computational problems rather than information storage and retrieval. The tougher problems like business process scheduling, supply line management, financial planning, etc. have yet to be truly automated because these are *gosh* very tough problems that generally seem to require some expert knowledge and are not even close to trivial to solve. If you [i]do[/i] have such software, you're likely a very large company. No small business can afford that kind of specialized software yet. However, if you give MS Office and Windows to most small-medium businesses they're pretty much set.
IT for business has never been so much about processing information as much as storing and retrieving it in a predictable and reliable manner. Look at the job listings for DBAs and web developers (with SQL/DBA experience required) compared to the number of desktop application coders. Now look at how many of them are for full-time positions rather than contract / temp positions. So where is most information processing really done that's beyond trivial now? By the original business-oriented computers: people.
Music is dying in the underground too
on
The Way the Music Died
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
My experience here stems from black metal and old school industrial. Seems that the past 10-15 years have produced little in such burgeoning genres.
Many people in the underground seem to believe that you can create truly awesome / creative music through:
1. hybridization. Just take two related genres (rock and jazz to fusion, 2. randomly hybridizing unrelated genres in an alchemic fashion with some artistic sense. Few succeed here (mainly Mr. Bungle, Ulver,
They seem to forget that sometimes you just need to do something that, while based upon earlier material, takes a wholly different approach that distinguishes it from the influences - a mutation. Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were both groundbreaking acts that could be linked to their forefathers, but there was something truly "special." We could say the same for Glenn Miller and his generation. So many people hated it from the classical community, but then it caught on with others. Darkthrone's first album was considered totally awful by the label and they were horrified at the production, but it clicked and Darkthrone clones have been spewed out for over 10 years now. Kraftwerk was hated and considered "musically vacuous" by many established music critics back then. Then came Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and eventually Skinny Puppy. Has anyone seriously taken industrial to a new level (as opposed to simplification like NIN or Razed in Black) in the past 10 years? Nah, not really.
Nobody comes up with a BRAND NEW genre or subgenre like that so much anymore it seems. What has been "new" in the underground for the past 10 years? Oh wow, emo, screamo, grindcore? There's still a handful of truly innovative bands and everyone copies there.
So we need completely new genres for the real innovation it seems. And this is where real musicians will always shine and appreciated by those who still listen to music, not "audio entertainment" like the industry has done.
My point is that it doesn't matter if it's an "industry" - the underground can suffer from clones, lack of imagination, and commoditization just as much as mainstream. Real artists that innovate, are inspired, and have no need to "please" anyone but themselves will continue to do far more than those who simply follow in the shadow of others.
Of course, there are those with uber-expensive audio equipment that will tell you MP3 is inferior to Ogg Vorbis outright. I've used all sorts of LAME settings to get something comparable to Ogg Vorbis at 224 kbps or so, but why should I have to go through all those hurdles when I can simply encode my music with -q 7 to get something that sounds about exactly the same?
Besides, not all parameters work best with all sorts of music either - MP3 royally screws up a lot of recordings I have at any bitrate or option I've used (Profanatica demos, early Emperor recordings, Clandestine Blaze, etc.), but it's the same with Ogg Vorbis. So the only way for me to enjoy those without resorting to the originals is to encode it using FLAC or some other lossless compression.
The point is that encoding music "right" is an art that's difficult to get right since "one size does not fit all."
A friend of mine from MIT was talking about one of the buildings there that was 18 stories tall but was on like 30 ft risers, and the wind gusts under there made it seem like a wind tunnel. Now, if we could cough up the money, we could get some wind power out of that and possibly provide some extra power to the building and cut costs in the long run. If EVERY home in the developed world ran a combination of solar and wind power, would we really need the electric companies? And no, I don't think it's actually feasible given the initial and maintenance costs.
The most popular artists listened to by the younger demographic of RIAA's customers will be the ones RIAA flags most often - that's news? I thought that'd be obvious.
But hey, if they really were going for the younger, "high-probability of file-sharing" audience, they'd be worried about my Slayer, Monstrosity, and Vader stuff (Metal Blade is a RIAA label).
Look at some of the titles they picked:
Artist: Cradle Of Filth
Title: Beauty Slept In Sodom
Artist: Opeth
Title: Blackwater Park
Artst: Tiamat
Album: A Deeper Kind Of Slumber
These three all had rather high scores with a lower standard deviation. A good percentage of listeners can't tell apart guitar distortion (especially really heavy ones) much apart from each other. In fact, metal is the hardest of all genres to compress with the best quality because of the high entropy (don't tell me double bass drums and shrill screams from some castrated puppy like Dani Filth don't have high entropy). I find it hard to believe that so many people could give such high marks (quite near the max possible) to metal without being a diehard metalhead (and even then some think the compressed ones sound better than the original).
They are all good recordings, but the problem that I see with the selections is the lack of dynamics - the #1 problem in modern metal music. Opeth well... I'll take Maudlin of the Well (or whatever that band is now called) over them.
So what kind of people work in the NSA? People like you and me. Geeks and nerds. Lots of them. Some contractors too, sure. And bunches of non-geeks in the mix (they have janitors, right? Or are those guys uber-special too?).
It's like any tech-oriented business if you look at what we can see (looking at Ft. Meade and watching people go to work and everything). Forget the "mystery" and "godlike" status that everyone perceives for a second. It's an organization like any other business, and an effective organization is only possible if all people work together. But remember, these people have morals, they have laws protecting them from harm, and they have concerns about what their employer does as well.
Back on topic, if you were paranoid about threats from abroad constantly (I imagine if you knew all sorts of neato stuff you'd be pretty paranoid), then you would most likely distrust anything from overseas and maybe even within the US (one poster already mentioned this as commonplace). So they'd probably audit software, heck yeah... even rip apart distributed binaries and analyze them to confirm that there's no "weird-looking piece of assembly" that doesn't seem to execute no matter what you try. And remember how slow everybody in the government works? Look at the postal service! That's a government agency too!
Nothing much of a surprise to me, but maybe it comes as a mild shock to most people in general.
I didn't even get along much with the geeks at my high school. Although there was a connection at a superficial level, I never did anything with any fellow geeks and I just didn't like at least half the stuff they liked. I liked the stuff like computers, math, etc. but I never cared about the "peripheral" components of geekdom - the RPGs, the total lack of normal social interaction, Star Trek, etc. That pretty much ruined all interaction with the other geeks.
Perhaps I've got it all wrong and geeks are such that they're constantly in search of fellow geeks because they're the only ones they feel that can truly relate with them, which further segregates them from "normal" people. Maybe I just haven't gotten out much and lurk way too much for healthy living.
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I think the problem lies in the fact that computing software and hardware has basically solved the processing needs of most businesses from a computational perspective. Spreadsheets, word processing, and encrypting information are all most businesses really want that are computational problems rather than information storage and retrieval. The tougher problems like business process scheduling, supply line management, financial planning, etc. have yet to be truly automated because these are *gosh* very tough problems that generally seem to require some expert knowledge and are not even close to trivial to solve. If you [i]do[/i] have such software, you're likely a very large company. No small business can afford that kind of specialized software yet. However, if you give MS Office and Windows to most small-medium businesses they're pretty much set. IT for business has never been so much about processing information as much as storing and retrieving it in a predictable and reliable manner. Look at the job listings for DBAs and web developers (with SQL/DBA experience required) compared to the number of desktop application coders. Now look at how many of them are for full-time positions rather than contract / temp positions. So where is most information processing really done that's beyond trivial now? By the original business-oriented computers: people.
Does raiding BWL in World of Warcraft with Ventrillo count under communication skills on a resume?
You're alliance? Pfft
My experience here stems from black metal and old school industrial. Seems that the past 10-15 years have produced little in such burgeoning genres.
Many people in the underground seem to believe that you can create truly awesome / creative music through:
1. hybridization. Just take two related genres (rock and jazz to fusion,
2. randomly hybridizing unrelated genres in an alchemic fashion with some artistic sense. Few succeed here (mainly Mr. Bungle, Ulver,
They seem to forget that sometimes you just need to do something that, while based upon earlier material, takes a wholly different approach that distinguishes it from the influences - a mutation. Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were both groundbreaking acts that could be linked to their forefathers, but there was something truly "special." We could say the same for Glenn Miller and his generation. So many people hated it from the classical community, but then it caught on with others. Darkthrone's first album was considered totally awful by the label and they were horrified at the production, but it clicked and Darkthrone clones have been spewed out for over 10 years now. Kraftwerk was hated and considered "musically vacuous" by many established music critics back then. Then came Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and eventually Skinny Puppy. Has anyone seriously taken industrial to a new level (as opposed to simplification like NIN or Razed in Black) in the past 10 years? Nah, not really.
Nobody comes up with a BRAND NEW genre or subgenre like that so much anymore it seems. What has been "new" in the underground for the past 10 years? Oh wow, emo, screamo, grindcore? There's still a handful of truly innovative bands and everyone copies there.
So we need completely new genres for the real innovation it seems. And this is where real musicians will always shine and appreciated by those who still listen to music, not "audio entertainment" like the industry has done.
My point is that it doesn't matter if it's an "industry" - the underground can suffer from clones, lack of imagination, and commoditization just as much as mainstream. Real artists that innovate, are inspired, and have no need to "please" anyone but themselves will continue to do far more than those who simply follow in the shadow of others.
Of course, there are those with uber-expensive audio equipment that will tell you MP3 is inferior to Ogg Vorbis outright. I've used all sorts of LAME settings to get something comparable to Ogg Vorbis at 224 kbps or so, but why should I have to go through all those hurdles when I can simply encode my music with -q 7 to get something that sounds about exactly the same?
Besides, not all parameters work best with all sorts of music either - MP3 royally screws up a lot of recordings I have at any bitrate or option I've used (Profanatica demos, early Emperor recordings, Clandestine Blaze, etc.), but it's the same with Ogg Vorbis. So the only way for me to enjoy those without resorting to the originals is to encode it using FLAC or some other lossless compression.
The point is that encoding music "right" is an art that's difficult to get right since "one size does not fit all."
A friend of mine from MIT was talking about one of the buildings there that was 18 stories tall but was on like 30 ft risers, and the wind gusts under there made it seem like a wind tunnel. Now, if we could cough up the money, we could get some wind power out of that and possibly provide some extra power to the building and cut costs in the long run. If EVERY home in the developed world ran a combination of solar and wind power, would we really need the electric companies? And no, I don't think it's actually feasible given the initial and maintenance costs.
The most popular artists listened to by the younger demographic of RIAA's customers will be the ones RIAA flags most often - that's news? I thought that'd be obvious. But hey, if they really were going for the younger, "high-probability of file-sharing" audience, they'd be worried about my Slayer, Monstrosity, and Vader stuff (Metal Blade is a RIAA label).
Look at some of the titles they picked: Artist: Cradle Of Filth Title: Beauty Slept In Sodom Artist: Opeth Title: Blackwater Park Artst: Tiamat Album: A Deeper Kind Of Slumber These three all had rather high scores with a lower standard deviation. A good percentage of listeners can't tell apart guitar distortion (especially really heavy ones) much apart from each other. In fact, metal is the hardest of all genres to compress with the best quality because of the high entropy (don't tell me double bass drums and shrill screams from some castrated puppy like Dani Filth don't have high entropy). I find it hard to believe that so many people could give such high marks (quite near the max possible) to metal without being a diehard metalhead (and even then some think the compressed ones sound better than the original). They are all good recordings, but the problem that I see with the selections is the lack of dynamics - the #1 problem in modern metal music. Opeth well... I'll take Maudlin of the Well (or whatever that band is now called) over them.
So what kind of people work in the NSA? People like you and me. Geeks and nerds. Lots of them. Some contractors too, sure. And bunches of non-geeks in the mix (they have janitors, right? Or are those guys uber-special too?). It's like any tech-oriented business if you look at what we can see (looking at Ft. Meade and watching people go to work and everything). Forget the "mystery" and "godlike" status that everyone perceives for a second. It's an organization like any other business, and an effective organization is only possible if all people work together. But remember, these people have morals, they have laws protecting them from harm, and they have concerns about what their employer does as well. Back on topic, if you were paranoid about threats from abroad constantly (I imagine if you knew all sorts of neato stuff you'd be pretty paranoid), then you would most likely distrust anything from overseas and maybe even within the US (one poster already mentioned this as commonplace). So they'd probably audit software, heck yeah... even rip apart distributed binaries and analyze them to confirm that there's no "weird-looking piece of assembly" that doesn't seem to execute no matter what you try. And remember how slow everybody in the government works? Look at the postal service! That's a government agency too! Nothing much of a surprise to me, but maybe it comes as a mild shock to most people in general.
I didn't even get along much with the geeks at my high school. Although there was a connection at a superficial level, I never did anything with any fellow geeks and I just didn't like at least half the stuff they liked. I liked the stuff like computers, math, etc. but I never cared about the "peripheral" components of geekdom - the RPGs, the total lack of normal social interaction, Star Trek, etc. That pretty much ruined all interaction with the other geeks. Perhaps I've got it all wrong and geeks are such that they're constantly in search of fellow geeks because they're the only ones they feel that can truly relate with them, which further segregates them from "normal" people. Maybe I just haven't gotten out much and lurk way too much for healthy living.