It's worth pointing out though that this is a DARPA project which means it's *research*.
Yeah, I think some others here linked to DARPA pages that made it look like they've been working on things like this for quite a while now. I'm sure they won't give up entirely.:-)
Fewer eyeballs but presumably with better information. To bring a few more eyeballs in perhaps open it up to select academics and industry analysts (industry analysts could bring back that commercial hedge investment aspect). Perhaps encourage insurance companies to offer some kind of insurance based on a model like this (insurance against particular military and political threats) to companies that would be effected by those threats. Just watch the rates on insurance against different threats and you have the same predictive tool from a wide array of informed (and self-interested) opinion that this "future's market" would provide.
That's an excellent way of doing it. Maybe you should suggest it to them.
I think despite the "open" nature of this it would still be diplomatically problematic if the "official" and public(!) concensus view of a U.S. government project was that the king of Jordan had a 75% chance of being assasinated in the next year.
This is the only thing I find difficult to understand about this approach. It sounds like a good way to predict the future, but people have got to know that they're being monitored; and if it looks like something bad is going to happen, the government is obviously going to step in and try to prevent it. Jordan is one of the more friendly Arab nations and if we determined that there was a plot, we'd certainly take action. People would know that this was likely to happen and the price would go down. I think. But maybe I'm wrong? I'm sure the guys at DARPA have done some heavy thinking about this.
Besides, needing a lot of participants, attempting to nail a when and where bet on a terrorist act is pretty difficult given all the possibilities.
I believe they provide you with a few possibilities that they've already determined have some merit, and you put your money where your mouth is on which ones have legs. And I don't think it's necessarily terrorist acts per se, I think it was just political events in the Middle East, such as the likelyhood that Saddam would be caught or killed.
I've read through some of your comments and found that you use and support free software, developed by a group of volunteers. And volunteers who don't even have monetary losses to encourage them to do a good job, as the futures investors here do.
This situation is not efficient and you would be much better served by purchasing commercial software from the experts in the field, Microsoft.
I think the monetary angle to this, along with the impression that it was all about 'terrorist acts' (as I understand it, it's really more of a futures market on middle eastern political events--not necessarily terrorism itself) left a bad taste in mouths everywhere. Which is probably why it was pulled almost immediately.
It's kind of like open source for intelligence analysis. With enough eyeballs, all plots are shallow.:-)
But by involving money, they just made it look crass. I suppose they thought that was the only way to get people interested, but it makes them appear to be cold and heartless--at least the way the media was reporting it.
However, hard work doesn't necessarily make you a composer.
That's true. But I think the point still stands that the reason we're seeing so many transparent performers is that they aren't putting in a whole lot of thought. BTW, I wouldn't really make a distinction between a song writer and a composer, since they can both be reduced to rearranging already existing material. But that's a matter of how deeply you look at the words, really.
What makes all of the "great" composers so is that they never really needed to work anything out. Mozart could write entire compositions in days. And they were perfect. Perfect. Bach could sit at an organ and compose 6-part fugues off the top of his head.
But both Bach and Mozart put in a lot of hard work before doing either of those things. Mozart did just as much work as Beethoven, he just did it in his head while playing billiards or taking a walk.
And Bach had a lot of preparation before improvising. Most of that stuff is worked out in advance, whether consciously or not, by learning to transpose, invert, retrograde, or perform rhythmic and harmonic development. Improvisation is really one of the best parlor tricks in the world--you do a lot of learning and work before-hand, then it's easy to impress people later on. It's still difficult to do well, but it's a lot less work than it seems.
The same goes for performers. If you don't have it in you, no matter how hard you practice, study, work, etc, you'll never be great.
It's all technique that can be learned but you have to be clever and persistent. Having good resources doesn't hurt either. It's just that the devil is in the details; and the details are numerous and subtle to a point of being practically invisible. It's been a difficult journey for me and I'm amazed at how subtle many of those details are. But they make all the difference in the world.
You're not looking at this correctly. It's not 'musical training' as such--it's hard work. That's what is completely lacking with the boy bands and slut-of-the-month pop sensations; and that is what I suspect the original poster is really getting at. On the other hand, even people who can't read or write music, like Paul McCartney, can be fine composers. But it takes a lot of hard work and hard thought.
Most people don't realize how much time and effort it takes to write or even play well. Mozart spent a lot of time working on his compositions--constantly rearranging ideas, moving things around, working out developmental ideas. He just did it in his head instead of on paper.
Bach and Beethoven both struggled a great deal with their compositions, as can be seen when taking a look at the manuscripts. The angry scratches of Beethoven, to the point of destroying the paper, Bach's pleading in the margin for divine help, both testify to the mental anguish and effort involved.
And the jazz pianist for whom my Slashdot nick is a dedication, Art Tatum, spent a hell of a lot of lonely hours at the piano working out compositional ideas so that he could perform astonishing improvisations on the fly. Same for Oscar Peterson.
Finally, I should note that these tools being demonstrated are a lot like the way computers are used by scientists. They help get more work done in less time but they still need someone who knows what they're doing to evaluate the output, cull it down, reorganize it, and make it meaningful. You wouldn't just take the output and slap it on a CD.
Do please note that you would still be in violation of copyright if you sang a pop song. Even though you're not violating the copyright on the recording, you're violating the songwriter's copyright, which very well could be held by the label.
You could still write your own music and just label it as a currently popular song. Or you could use something in the public domain.
Some (most?) of the funding for mk came from Apple, and I believe that it is the basis for OS X.
Just as an FYI thing, the OS X kernel is actually derived from a marriage of FreeBSD and the NeXT codebase (which is another Mach-based kernel, with some differences from OSF/1). They killed the Objective-C DriverKit, added some new classes to OpenStep, updated some userland things, did general fiddling that didn't need to be done, and voila: Mac OS X.
Heh. This reminds me of our dealings with the cable company a couple of weeks ago.
Some moron down the street was trying to cut down a tree on Sunday afternoon and lost control of it. It fell across the power lines and our neighborhood was dark for a couple of hours. When the power came back, our cable was out. So my mom calls the cable company and informs the lady of the situation, including the downed line. She also informed her that the 'cable' light was out on the cable modem. The tech support person actually told her to try unplugging the cable modem, waiting 15 seconds, then plugging it back in! I was rolling my eyes and laughing but I was still forced to go through with it.
Obviously, this did nothing, so the tech support lady said we would have to call the internet tech support center, since our issue was with the cable modem. (We also had trouble with cable TV reception, but she seemed to gloss over that.)
When I finally got the internet support guy on the phone, I told him what had just happened and he sounded like he wasn't terribly surprised at the suggestion I had been given. He told me to call back the regular cable people, tell them there was a line down, and strictly make no mention of the fact that we had a cable modem, so as not to confuse them.
Heh, as long as we're beating up on NJ, why is it that a new town starts every 10 feet up there? I lived in the Parsippany area for a year, and it seemed like no matter where you went, you were always "in town" somewhere. Strangest thing I've ever seen.
Here's something to think about: maybe, just maybe, MemeRot isn't one of the people proposing the support of Independent musicians. It's just a thought.
Yep. I looked at their site, and most of their stills had a look that I can only described as "over-produced". It looks like a lot of those dark Enlightenment themes and a lot of the desktop pixmaps floating around on Linux theme sites. It seems as if their goal is to cram as much "cool stuff" as they can into every frame, without regard to the single most important things in art: balance and proportion.
Furthermore, Michael's assertion that their site is 'spartan' has me very confused. I can only think that he must have been saying that tongue-in-cheek. After about 7 seconds, I felt like jabbing my eyeballs out with a screwdriver just to make it all go away. I see the death of the blink tag hasn't discouraged some people from finding new ways to assault visitors.
It's kind of hard to say. I seem to recall them actually claiming patent infringement at one point. They also were running with trade secrets, copyright, and contract violation. Who knows what the actual accusation is this week.
Because you get OpenStep development tools and API on OS X? GNUstep is cool too, but it's nice to have the NeXT/Apple environment for slightly more polished tools.
Well, I mix the two randomly. But asterisks are equivalent to bold text, not italics or oblique.
I think the use of
*asterisks* (bold)
/forward slashes/ (oblique or italic) or
_underscores_ (underline)
are holdovers from the days of plaintext mail and online services. Perhaps there's more of a correlation between old-timers on PCs and dual-booting, however?
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations are due. That's the only *funny* 1...3 reference I've seen on Slashdot. And I've seen plenty.
Yeah, I think some others here linked to DARPA pages that made it look like they've been working on things like this for quite a while now. I'm sure they won't give up entirely. :-)
Fewer eyeballs but presumably with better information. To bring a few more eyeballs in perhaps open it up to select academics and industry analysts (industry analysts could bring back that commercial hedge investment aspect). Perhaps encourage insurance companies to offer some kind of insurance based on a model like this (insurance against particular military and political threats) to companies that would be effected by those threats. Just watch the rates on insurance against different threats and you have the same predictive tool from a wide array of informed (and self-interested) opinion that this "future's market" would provide.
That's an excellent way of doing it. Maybe you should suggest it to them.
I think despite the "open" nature of this it would still be diplomatically problematic if the "official" and public(!) concensus view of a U.S. government project was that the king of Jordan had a 75% chance of being assasinated in the next year.
This is the only thing I find difficult to understand about this approach. It sounds like a good way to predict the future, but people have got to know that they're being monitored; and if it looks like something bad is going to happen, the government is obviously going to step in and try to prevent it. Jordan is one of the more friendly Arab nations and if we determined that there was a plot, we'd certainly take action. People would know that this was likely to happen and the price would go down. I think. But maybe I'm wrong? I'm sure the guys at DARPA have done some heavy thinking about this.
I believe they provide you with a few possibilities that they've already determined have some merit, and you put your money where your mouth is on which ones have legs. And I don't think it's necessarily terrorist acts per se, I think it was just political events in the Middle East, such as the likelyhood that Saddam would be caught or killed.
This situation is not efficient and you would be much better served by purchasing commercial software from the experts in the field, Microsoft.
That's his point: protection for companies that stand to lose if something like this does happen. Airlines, for instance.
I think the monetary angle to this, along with the impression that it was all about 'terrorist acts' (as I understand it, it's really more of a futures market on middle eastern political events--not necessarily terrorism itself) left a bad taste in mouths everywhere. Which is probably why it was pulled almost immediately.
But by involving money, they just made it look crass. I suppose they thought that was the only way to get people interested, but it makes them appear to be cold and heartless--at least the way the media was reporting it.
That's true. But I think the point still stands that the reason we're seeing so many transparent performers is that they aren't putting in a whole lot of thought. BTW, I wouldn't really make a distinction between a song writer and a composer, since they can both be reduced to rearranging already existing material. But that's a matter of how deeply you look at the words, really.
What makes all of the "great" composers so is that they never really needed to work anything out. Mozart could write entire compositions in days. And they were perfect. Perfect. Bach could sit at an organ and compose 6-part fugues off the top of his head.
But both Bach and Mozart put in a lot of hard work before doing either of those things. Mozart did just as much work as Beethoven, he just did it in his head while playing billiards or taking a walk.
And Bach had a lot of preparation before improvising. Most of that stuff is worked out in advance, whether consciously or not, by learning to transpose, invert, retrograde, or perform rhythmic and harmonic development. Improvisation is really one of the best parlor tricks in the world--you do a lot of learning and work before-hand, then it's easy to impress people later on. It's still difficult to do well, but it's a lot less work than it seems.
The same goes for performers. If you don't have it in you, no matter how hard you practice, study, work, etc, you'll never be great.
It's all technique that can be learned but you have to be clever and persistent. Having good resources doesn't hurt either. It's just that the devil is in the details; and the details are numerous and subtle to a point of being practically invisible. It's been a difficult journey for me and I'm amazed at how subtle many of those details are. But they make all the difference in the world.
Most people don't realize how much time and effort it takes to write or even play well. Mozart spent a lot of time working on his compositions--constantly rearranging ideas, moving things around, working out developmental ideas. He just did it in his head instead of on paper.
Bach and Beethoven both struggled a great deal with their compositions, as can be seen when taking a look at the manuscripts. The angry scratches of Beethoven, to the point of destroying the paper, Bach's pleading in the margin for divine help, both testify to the mental anguish and effort involved.
And the jazz pianist for whom my Slashdot nick is a dedication, Art Tatum, spent a hell of a lot of lonely hours at the piano working out compositional ideas so that he could perform astonishing improvisations on the fly. Same for Oscar Peterson.
Finally, I should note that these tools being demonstrated are a lot like the way computers are used by scientists. They help get more work done in less time but they still need someone who knows what they're doing to evaluate the output, cull it down, reorganize it, and make it meaningful. You wouldn't just take the output and slap it on a CD.
Sounds like a good idea to me...
The most difficult thing to decide would probably be whether the manuals should be in French or English. :-)
Haha, that's true. I hadn't thought of that angle.
You could still write your own music and just label it as a currently popular song. Or you could use something in the public domain.
Come on, you're the one named Horny Smurf. :-)
Just as an FYI thing, the OS X kernel is actually derived from a marriage of FreeBSD and the NeXT codebase (which is another Mach-based kernel, with some differences from OSF/1). They killed the Objective-C DriverKit, added some new classes to OpenStep, updated some userland things, did general fiddling that didn't need to be done, and voila: Mac OS X.
Some moron down the street was trying to cut down a tree on Sunday afternoon and lost control of it. It fell across the power lines and our neighborhood was dark for a couple of hours. When the power came back, our cable was out. So my mom calls the cable company and informs the lady of the situation, including the downed line. She also informed her that the 'cable' light was out on the cable modem. The tech support person actually told her to try unplugging the cable modem, waiting 15 seconds, then plugging it back in! I was rolling my eyes and laughing but I was still forced to go through with it.
Obviously, this did nothing, so the tech support lady said we would have to call the internet tech support center, since our issue was with the cable modem. (We also had trouble with cable TV reception, but she seemed to gloss over that.)
When I finally got the internet support guy on the phone, I told him what had just happened and he sounded like he wasn't terribly surprised at the suggestion I had been given. He told me to call back the regular cable people, tell them there was a line down, and strictly make no mention of the fact that we had a cable modem, so as not to confuse them.
Heh, as long as we're beating up on NJ, why is it that a new town starts every 10 feet up there? I lived in the Parsippany area for a year, and it seemed like no matter where you went, you were always "in town" somewhere. Strangest thing I've ever seen.
Here's something to think about: maybe, just maybe, MemeRot isn't one of the people proposing the support of Independent musicians. It's just a thought.
Heh-heh. Pretty funny. Sad that you have to put the at the end though, isn't it?
Furthermore, Michael's assertion that their site is 'spartan' has me very confused. I can only think that he must have been saying that tongue-in-cheek. After about 7 seconds, I felt like jabbing my eyeballs out with a screwdriver just to make it all go away. I see the death of the blink tag hasn't discouraged some people from finding new ways to assault visitors.
It's kind of hard to say. I seem to recall them actually claiming patent infringement at one point. They also were running with trade secrets, copyright, and contract violation. Who knows what the actual accusation is this week.
Because you get OpenStep development tools and API on OS X? GNUstep is cool too, but it's nice to have the NeXT/Apple environment for slightly more polished tools.
I think the use of
- *asterisks* (bold)
- /forward slashes/ (oblique or italic) or
- _underscores_ (underline)
are holdovers from the days of plaintext mail and online services. Perhaps there's more of a correlation between old-timers on PCs and dual-booting, however?Heh, how about sending them invitations to sue us, complete with address, phone, email, and kernel version?
Have they finally decided on contract violation? For a while there, it seemed like they were just randomly picking a different accusation every week.