the artists don't make money on CD sales...
the artists don't make money on touring...
How then, do the fucking artists eat?
I've known a LOT of performers in my day. Some are still in bands, some are long since retired. And even the (serious) ones who "never made it" mad(k)e money on touring.
"Not that many people do it so it's not so bad" is a complete and utter BULLSHIT argument. It is every bit as much based on ELITISM as are the (equally) outdated views espoused by so many in the entertainment industry.
The rate we are going it soon won't be "only a few" - the capability will either be within the grasp of everyone or no one. As a whole what will benefit society most?
Either you are for the technology, or you ain't. You can't make the exception that it's OK so long as only the elite can do it, because sooner or later someone is going to be more "elite" than you and then what are you gonna do?
Me giving you a copy of windows is "speech" - if I give you a copy of windows I am supporting windows because I have helped make it just a tiny bit more pervasive. Who is harmed? Microsoft? The software industry as a whole that relies windows? If I give you a copy of windows you're that much more likely to go out and buy some more software that runs under windows. You may instead (also) get that software for free, but it's inarguable that you are infinitely more likely to buy windows software if you have a PC that runs windows than if you have no PC at all running windows.
If I give you a copy of my favorite CD from my recording artist, you are more likely to look for more work form that artist - again, infinitely more likely than if you never heard of the artist at all.
Similarly, if I share with you all my notes and workbooks from college the professor may not care for it, the school may not care for it, but on the whole society has benefitted because you now have knowledge of a subject you didn't have before.
Ergo, it is all "speech." All the court can determine is whether someone has been harmed by the speech, and whether they are entitled to compensation for that harm.
Honestly, this is nothing remarkably new or insightful. I'm just reminding you because it seems to have slipped from your mind.
About that "unsustainable" software industry in russia: do you know how many hired guns are working in russia and ukraine? As I understand it India also has a rather large "piracy" market and yet it also employs thousands of people working tech support, programming, even system administration. Similarly, some companies have their entire network support staff in russia, india or china. When the network is pervasive you don't need the guy who configures the server sitting in the next room.
Hell, one of the very few shareware programs I ever bought - Reget deluxe - is Windows software written, supported and sold internationally by a small Russian company!
Piracy is just another (valid) mechanism of a free market. If software companies want to sell more software and music companies want to sell more music, they need to set the prices such that more people can afford them. They need to offer something that people will find of value and want to support. And they need to foster a more egalitarian society that affords more people the opportunity to attain enough dispoable income that they can afford to support such frivolties. Copyright doesn't mean jack when it's a choice between paying for information or paying for food - and for most of the people in those countries you mention, that's the choice they often must make. But fortunately, with modern technology, it's also a choice fewer of us all are forced to make. Freedom is a wonderful thing... especially for creative people with something of value to share.
The line gets even blurrier than that nowdays. You can get an "8051" (for less than ten bucks) that runs at ten MIPS, supports 24 bit linear address space, has ON CHIP CAN and 10/100 support and even comes with the hooks for its own RTOS right in on-chip memory. You can program it in c or in java and it'll still run fast enough to network and play MP3s in real time. Seems to me you'd need quite a lot of capability in an embedded device these days to justify linux (or even CE, for that matter).
Sure they have other fish to fry, but considering that most people I know, including those who can barely use a computer, are sharing software movies and music, perhaps government has to grow a little to keep this from becoming even worse as in some places like China and Russia.
Context:
Now that anyone I know can afford a book how will the church control information? Now that anyone I know can afford to copy a page from a book, how will publishers and printers stay in business?
Shit happens. It's not our government's job to protect us from knowledge and information... unlike in those "free" countries you mentioned.
"Being there" is not, to my knowledge, the goal of film. So far as I know it never has been. it's a 2D media, which means if you want to compare it to audio it's still using 1920's technology (yes, by the thirties they already had multichannel sound in theatres).
Film is an impression of "reality." If you want "real" you go see a play or an opera - "real" actors, "real" time, and "real" sets.
And "digital" still has plenty of "grain" it just has differnt properties than film "grain" - just like digital audio has its own "different" distortions (quantization, etc) than "analog" distortions (which digital also has, of course).
And yes, adding "hiss" to "digital" absolutely has real merits. I can demonstrate quite well how random noise added to a (badly) mpeg compressed video results in video that looks better than without the noise. Additionally, it will have less apparent noise than the "clean" MPEG version. If you want to extrapolate this to audio, I invite you to try it yourself using 8 bit,22khz sampled audio with and without additional white noise during playback. Of course, that would require you actually experiencing something instead of making ridiculous comments on/., but I remain hopeful; do let us know how it works out for you.
Sounds like the UK was the very opposite of here. When I was a kid my best friend was the guy who ran the record store in town. I used to hang out there all day, too, although I didn't smoke pot. I just hung there (and a few others) because we were friends and the store was usually pretty slow (small town).
But we all cared about music, and we knew music very well. All the store sold was musical equipment, stereo equipment, and music - not pins and ribbons here. But my bud was in school and didn't really care too much about the store - it was a trap for him (the family business) and he was more concerned with getting his phd so he could get on with a career of his own.
Anyway there were probably tens of housands of music stores like that back then. Some were hard core, some were family businesses - but most all had one thing in common: the people running them at least KNEW something about the music they specialized in. A good many of them traded in used records as well.
But most of those places are gone now - they died even before the chains started feeling the pinch. With the chains in the back pocket of the majors, I think this change is actually a good thing. Because the one thing the indierecord stores CAN provide like no other is service. If the indies were to specialize in indie artists, in providing a local "hangout" and a place for people to gather and trade knowledge and music, they could once again become a dominant force in the industry.
Consider: why is it OK to hang out in a book store, sit and drink coffee and read all day, but record stores think this is so bad?
Even with the internet, people still like gathering and hanging out. Provide a place for them to feel comfortable and organize your service around that model, and there's no telling where the stores of the future could go. Think about people sitting around, drinking coffee and eating crullers, trading music on their ipods, exchanging knowledge - maybe even bringing in their old LPs to have them "ripped" to SHNs or APEs on the store's high quality LP playback system.
No matter how they spin it, I just never hear a downside when talking about the death of the (old) music industry. It's a great time to be alive... unless you're a slave of the RIAA.
Actually, bud, you're the one who got it wrong. Refresh rate has absolutely nothing to do with frame rate. When I watch a DVD does my monitor switch to 24FPS? Hell no - it's 75Hz or 90Hz or whatever the hell I set it at, and that's where it stays no matter if I'm watching TV at 60FPS or a film at 24FPS - or even a POS quicktime trailer at 15FPS. Those "fading pixels" are rewritten 75 or 90 times per second no matter what the frame rate.
I have here lots of concert footage here that was shot direct to video; some was taken from old SNL performances, some was taken from digital sat caps of Rockpalast performances. I use a deinterlacer algorithm (roughly equivalent to the faroujda HD convertor) that expands each field to full screen rez and doubles the frame rate - and there is a HUGE visible difference between the full 50 or 60FPS and 25 or 30FPS.
The difference is because of how quickly those "pixels" get rewritten - but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with them "fading." The simple fact is doubling the frame rate gives the eye more information because even;tho it's switching faster than we perceive, it's "smoothing over" twice as much signal from the noisy media. It's roughly analagious to doubling the sample rate of audio; the ear may not strictly "need" it, but the increased sample rate increases S/N ratio - no matter if it's audio, or video.
To what are you applying this? If you are trying to make high rez from bad video caps or a DVD, that's a whole 'nother animal than astronomy.
I've been working on this for some time and have had a decent amount of success using multiple captures of digital broadcast (broadcasts are still generally encoded on the fly, so each stream will be different). This can also be applied (with great success) to analog captures of broadcast video. Just sum each capture with equal weighting and you'll be surprised how much detail you can gain. Of course, this won't work at all if you are trying to improve a DVD, since you have only the one stream.
If you want to combine frames temporally, a temporal filter will do this - that's what it's for. I tend to dislike temporal filters because they add all sorts of other artifacts I find exceedingly objectionable, but if you are working on relatively low motion video you can gain a bit of detail like this. I can't comment on mac software because I don't have one, but I've worked a good bit on and with AVISynth and I know a couple of people have been working on temporal filters that use motion vectors. I rolled my own, but it's a macro op specific to avisynth and I don't know if you could duplicate all the specific filter behaviors using mac software. Maybe if someone would port ASVISynth to mac or linux...
Apparently you didn't see this. There are some awesome stills out there from the completed film; although I don't believe this is one of them, it's still fairly representative of what I've seen.
I firmly believe much of what people find lacking in "digital film" is the noise and grain - much like digital audio. Of course, the technology is very young - digital video is relatively where digital audio was around 1985. Still, taking a "clean" film and adding a bit of "grain" richens it considerably.
Anyway, let's see you do a complete 90 minute feature in one very long take while hauling around a film camera...
I wish someone would craft a better desktop system for linux, but I can't do it because the project would be way over my head and I just don't want it bad enough to learn all the ins and outs of writing a UI shell.
Now, here's someone who is motivated to learn how to write a "better" OS. And it's his time (and the others corresponding on the project) so how does this "take away" anything?
Consider: the entertainment industry "loses" Billions of dollars each year to people who don't buy music and don't visit theatres to see movies they "found" elsewhere. Buw we all know they lose nothing at all, right? fact is, the industry makes tens of Billions worldwide in profits each year... so where is the loss?
It's in the same place as all those programmers "lost" to duplicate projects. Yeah, it's stupid how many text editors there are out there - but it's a project every programming student has to tackle in their first year of classes; everyone has to learn, and they have to learn somewhere.
Whose to say where the next great desktop is gonna come from? Do you really expect it to come from Redmond? If so then you got nothing to complain about, because they got all the programmers they need and have no trouble finding more.
And, if you think otherwise, then you still got nothing to complain about - because all that "duplicated effort" is creating a mountain of source for some ingenious twelfth grader to hack together into the next neXt... just as soon as she learns how it all goes together...
I won't comment on the phone, but being a dialup user myself I know how much it can suck. And if the best I could do was 28.8 you better believe I'd have a satellite dish on the roof. Jeez, why even bother at that speed?
But do you think there are any fundamentalists wishing they could get a copy of Blue Velvet without "the disturbing parts?" What about editing out all the "disturbing" parts of Eraserhead?
I'm watching to see when the processors start talking serial directly. Getting rid of the exotic seven thousand pin packages for processors (and their associated sockets) will be another great savings.
I've long wondered why CPUs rely on bridge chips to talk to memory, but even at 2.5gbps you'd need several memory interfaces to keep the CPU full. So, while it would be cool to have a CPU that used a relatively high level serial interface for everything, you'd still want dozens (or maybe even hundreds) of independant ports to communicate with all the memory and other peripherals.
Sorry, but you are using "PCI-X" and "PCI-Express" interchangeably, and they're not at all. PCI-Express is pretty fundamentally changed from PCI; PCI-X is like "DDR" PCI - that is, it's basically just speeded up PCI (266,533 and even 1066 in the mix).
Unfortunately even those who are looking to hang onto "legacy PCI" (ie PCI-X) for a few more years concede they will be changing to PCI-Express when the time is right; they simply maintain that, with it being new technology, the time isn't yet right.
This is what happens when you get all your tech news from Anand and ZDnet. Why the hell can't/. link to an industry reference on this sort of topic? I realize this ain't a whole lot better, but at least it's not written (entirely) by poorly informed hobbyists.
Changing? So what? too late. I am not an ex napster zealot - in fact, I'm not even much of an ex napster user. I had it installed for a time and tried it out, but I could probably count on one hand the number of tracks I downloaded with it. and yet, during all their fracas, they managed to finger ME as an infringer. Now, I really don't give a damn that my account was locked out; I mean, it would have been supremely easy (of course) just to get another. But if I was fingered then I'm sure thousands more were. And their music just ain't good enough to tolerate such a snotty, whuiny attitude. For such alleged badasses they managed to whine like little girls for more than a year, and because of that they'll never again be taken seriously either as artists or as "rockers."
I've not listened to a single one of their tracks (except for the occasional use in a film soundtrack) in several years now and I can honestly say I don't miss the pissants one little bit. That some people will not only continue to buy their CDs but even support them on tour and by taking advantage of this stupid website deal only further proves the old adage of "people are fucking idiots."
to say how much this article sucks. I should have known when I saw "Tom's" that it would be nothing but a few pages of useless drivel slapped into a directory as an excuse to sell ads, but I thought because this was a/. "cover story" it might be worth checking out.
Looks like I was wrong - or, actually, right all along. Musta been a slow news day?
It doesn't have to be "short" of 802.11-ish long haul/personal ssh-ish. All that need be done is get rid of FSK and use a reasonably SOTA method - like cofdm, quam, etc.
Modems use ~3khz of bandwidth to get >48kbps. HF channels have more than twice that bandwidth available, and if you are using a digital front end there's no reason at all you can't use more than channel at the very same time. Use two VHF channels (say, on the also-unregulated 49mhz band) and it's not at all unreasonable to expect >200kbps - on a packetized multichannel service with no line-of-sight issues.
Which might actually be a good thing to take to court, as it will point out in legal terms just one of the many ways the US is legislating itself right out of the ability to compete in the world market. When you mandate your own companies cannot provide technology that can be purchased elsewhere, who are you harming?
Slashdot Mirror
the artists don't make money on CD sales...
the artists don't make money on touring...
How then, do the fucking artists eat?
I've known a LOT of performers in my day. Some are still in bands, some are long since retired. And even the (serious) ones who "never made it" mad(k)e money on touring.
The rate we are going it soon won't be "only a few" - the capability will either be within the grasp of everyone or no one. As a whole what will benefit society most?
Either you are for the technology, or you ain't. You can't make the exception that it's OK so long as only the elite can do it, because sooner or later someone is going to be more "elite" than you and then what are you gonna do?
If I give you a copy of my favorite CD from my recording artist, you are more likely to look for more work form that artist - again, infinitely more likely than if you never heard of the artist at all.
Similarly, if I share with you all my notes and workbooks from college the professor may not care for it, the school may not care for it, but on the whole society has benefitted because you now have knowledge of a subject you didn't have before.
Ergo, it is all "speech." All the court can determine is whether someone has been harmed by the speech, and whether they are entitled to compensation for that harm.
Honestly, this is nothing remarkably new or insightful. I'm just reminding you because it seems to have slipped from your mind.
About that "unsustainable" software industry in russia: do you know how many hired guns are working in russia and ukraine? As I understand it India also has a rather large "piracy" market and yet it also employs thousands of people working tech support, programming, even system administration. Similarly, some companies have their entire network support staff in russia, india or china. When the network is pervasive you don't need the guy who configures the server sitting in the next room.
Hell, one of the very few shareware programs I ever bought - Reget deluxe - is Windows software written, supported and sold internationally by a small Russian company!
Piracy is just another (valid) mechanism of a free market. If software companies want to sell more software and music companies want to sell more music, they need to set the prices such that more people can afford them. They need to offer something that people will find of value and want to support. And they need to foster a more egalitarian society that affords more people the opportunity to attain enough dispoable income that they can afford to support such frivolties. Copyright doesn't mean jack when it's a choice between paying for information or paying for food - and for most of the people in those countries you mention, that's the choice they often must make. But fortunately, with modern technology, it's also a choice fewer of us all are forced to make. Freedom is a wonderful thing... especially for creative people with something of value to share.
The line gets even blurrier than that nowdays. You can get an "8051" (for less than ten bucks) that runs at ten MIPS, supports 24 bit linear address space, has ON CHIP CAN and 10/100 support and even comes with the hooks for its own RTOS right in on-chip memory. You can program it in c or in java and it'll still run fast enough to network and play MP3s in real time. Seems to me you'd need quite a lot of capability in an embedded device these days to justify linux (or even CE, for that matter).
Context:
Now that anyone I know can afford a book how will the church control information? Now that anyone I know can afford to copy a page from a book, how will publishers and printers stay in business?
Shit happens. It's not our government's job to protect us from knowledge and information... unlike in those "free" countries you mentioned.
That wasn't even what I was talking about. Actualy, what I was talking about is the very opposite of "hiding."
but a good technician won't do it in the superstitious way you advocate, just because "white noise makes it sound better."
I knew you wouldn't do any research before replying... again
Film is an impression of "reality." If you want "real" you go see a play or an opera - "real" actors, "real" time, and "real" sets.
And "digital" still has plenty of "grain" it just has differnt properties than film "grain" - just like digital audio has its own "different" distortions (quantization, etc) than "analog" distortions (which digital also has, of course).
And yes, adding "hiss" to "digital" absolutely has real merits. I can demonstrate quite well how random noise added to a (badly) mpeg compressed video results in video that looks better than without the noise. Additionally, it will have less apparent noise than the "clean" MPEG version. If you want to extrapolate this to audio, I invite you to try it yourself using 8 bit,22khz sampled audio with and without additional white noise during playback. Of course, that would require you actually experiencing something instead of making ridiculous comments on /., but I remain hopeful; do let us know how it works out for you.
Is that why photoshop and gimp come with all those rendering tools to add "texture" to an image?
Film is a moving image. If texture is meant to be a part of that image, who are you to argue with the artist sharing her creative vision?
But we all cared about music, and we knew music very well. All the store sold was musical equipment, stereo equipment, and music - not pins and ribbons here. But my bud was in school and didn't really care too much about the store - it was a trap for him (the family business) and he was more concerned with getting his phd so he could get on with a career of his own.
Anyway there were probably tens of housands of music stores like that back then. Some were hard core, some were family businesses - but most all had one thing in common: the people running them at least KNEW something about the music they specialized in. A good many of them traded in used records as well.
But most of those places are gone now - they died even before the chains started feeling the pinch. With the chains in the back pocket of the majors, I think this change is actually a good thing. Because the one thing the indierecord stores CAN provide like no other is service. If the indies were to specialize in indie artists, in providing a local "hangout" and a place for people to gather and trade knowledge and music, they could once again become a dominant force in the industry.
Consider: why is it OK to hang out in a book store, sit and drink coffee and read all day, but record stores think this is so bad?
Even with the internet, people still like gathering and hanging out. Provide a place for them to feel comfortable and organize your service around that model, and there's no telling where the stores of the future could go. Think about people sitting around, drinking coffee and eating crullers, trading music on their ipods, exchanging knowledge - maybe even bringing in their old LPs to have them "ripped" to SHNs or APEs on the store's high quality LP playback system.
No matter how they spin it, I just never hear a downside when talking about the death of the (old) music industry. It's a great time to be alive... unless you're a slave of the RIAA.
I have here lots of concert footage here that was shot direct to video; some was taken from old SNL performances, some was taken from digital sat caps of Rockpalast performances. I use a deinterlacer algorithm (roughly equivalent to the faroujda HD convertor) that expands each field to full screen rez and doubles the frame rate - and there is a HUGE visible difference between the full 50 or 60FPS and 25 or 30FPS.
The difference is because of how quickly those "pixels" get rewritten - but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with them "fading." The simple fact is doubling the frame rate gives the eye more information because even ;tho it's switching faster than we perceive, it's "smoothing over" twice as much signal from the noisy media. It's roughly analagious to doubling the sample rate of audio; the ear may not strictly "need" it, but the increased sample rate increases S/N ratio - no matter if it's audio, or video.
I've been working on this for some time and have had a decent amount of success using multiple captures of digital broadcast (broadcasts are still generally encoded on the fly, so each stream will be different). This can also be applied (with great success) to analog captures of broadcast video. Just sum each capture with equal weighting and you'll be surprised how much detail you can gain. Of course, this won't work at all if you are trying to improve a DVD, since you have only the one stream.
If you want to combine frames temporally, a temporal filter will do this - that's what it's for. I tend to dislike temporal filters because they add all sorts of other artifacts I find exceedingly objectionable, but if you are working on relatively low motion video you can gain a bit of detail like this. I can't comment on mac software because I don't have one, but I've worked a good bit on and with AVISynth and I know a couple of people have been working on temporal filters that use motion vectors. I rolled my own, but it's a macro op specific to avisynth and I don't know if you could duplicate all the specific filter behaviors using mac software. Maybe if someone would port ASVISynth to mac or linux...
I firmly believe much of what people find lacking in "digital film" is the noise and grain - much like digital audio. Of course, the technology is very young - digital video is relatively where digital audio was around 1985. Still, taking a "clean" film and adding a bit of "grain" richens it considerably.
Anyway, let's see you do a complete 90 minute feature in one very long take while hauling around a film camera...
Now, here's someone who is motivated to learn how to write a "better" OS. And it's his time (and the others corresponding on the project) so how does this "take away" anything?
Consider: the entertainment industry "loses" Billions of dollars each year to people who don't buy music and don't visit theatres to see movies they "found" elsewhere. Buw we all know they lose nothing at all, right? fact is, the industry makes tens of Billions worldwide in profits each year... so where is the loss?
It's in the same place as all those programmers "lost" to duplicate projects. Yeah, it's stupid how many text editors there are out there - but it's a project every programming student has to tackle in their first year of classes; everyone has to learn, and they have to learn somewhere.
Whose to say where the next great desktop is gonna come from? Do you really expect it to come from Redmond? If so then you got nothing to complain about, because they got all the programmers they need and have no trouble finding more.
And, if you think otherwise, then you still got nothing to complain about - because all that "duplicated effort" is creating a mountain of source for some ingenious twelfth grader to hack together into the next neXt... just as soon as she learns how it all goes together...
Now, in light of this info I'm wondering how my post got modded "informative." <insert smily here>
What? MAME uses old arcade ROMS - even HUGE sets are far less than a MB. I have dozens of MAME ROMs and they still take up a tiny space on the CD.
I won't comment on the phone, but being a dialup user myself I know how much it can suck. And if the best I could do was 28.8 you better believe I'd have a satellite dish on the roof. Jeez, why even bother at that speed?
But do you think there are any fundamentalists wishing they could get a copy of Blue Velvet without "the disturbing parts?" What about editing out all the "disturbing" parts of Eraserhead?
Now, where can I get an edited compilation of nothing but Kate Winslet nude scense?
Why not both?
I've long wondered why CPUs rely on bridge chips to talk to memory, but even at 2.5gbps you'd need several memory interfaces to keep the CPU full. So, while it would be cool to have a CPU that used a relatively high level serial interface for everything, you'd still want dozens (or maybe even hundreds) of independant ports to communicate with all the memory and other peripherals.
Unfortunately even those who are looking to hang onto "legacy PCI" (ie PCI-X) for a few more years concede they will be changing to PCI-Express when the time is right; they simply maintain that, with it being new technology, the time isn't yet right.
This is what happens when you get all your tech news from Anand and ZDnet. Why the hell can't /. link to an industry reference on this sort of topic? I realize this ain't a whole lot better, but at least it's not written (entirely) by poorly informed hobbyists.
I've not listened to a single one of their tracks (except for the occasional use in a film soundtrack) in several years now and I can honestly say I don't miss the pissants one little bit. That some people will not only continue to buy their CDs but even support them on tour and by taking advantage of this stupid website deal only further proves the old adage of "people are fucking idiots."
Looks like I was wrong - or, actually, right all along. Musta been a slow news day?
Modems use ~3khz of bandwidth to get >48kbps. HF channels have more than twice that bandwidth available, and if you are using a digital front end there's no reason at all you can't use more than channel at the very same time. Use two VHF channels (say, on the also-unregulated 49mhz band) and it's not at all unreasonable to expect >200kbps - on a packetized multichannel service with no line-of-sight issues.
This is NOT "packet radio."
Which might actually be a good thing to take to court, as it will point out in legal terms just one of the many ways the US is legislating itself right out of the ability to compete in the world market. When you mandate your own companies cannot provide technology that can be purchased elsewhere, who are you harming?
This ain't packet radio.