What, do artists and social workers not pay taxes or buy groceries? Doubtless you view them as inessential parts of the economy -- but this is the result of how the market treats them, not the other way around. Does anyone really think these types of people would spend a smaller percentage of their income than, say, missile engineers?
Now, perhaps by merit of their industry you could say the engineer's field has the potential to create more wealth (he may distantly affect the fighter jet industry, etc). But really -- I think you'd be hard pressed to prove the engineer creates more wealth per dollar of salary than the social worked does.
you've oversimplified to the point that your argument has no meaning. Sure, missile designers pay their salaries back to taxes that can be used on social programs. But that hardly seems like an efficient way to fund those programs. Why don't we funnel the money through, I don't know, artists, or social workers instead of Lockheed Martin employees? Or just spend it on the damn programs in the first place.
I own a GC and love it, but everything I've read points to this platform being the one with the most tenuous grasp on the retail market at the moment. Nintendo is a relatively healthy company, but that's mostly because it moves HUGE numbers of gameboys
I think we're both probably overstating our cases to some extent. Full disclosure: my comments are based on a few semesters' worth of psychoacoustics classes and watching my friend's band record an album. Admittedly limited credentials:)
With that said, I don't think you're right when you say all engineers that work loud burn out. I can attest to the fact that don zientara -- producer for most of the dischord label's catalog (most notably including fugazi) -- works very loud and has been doing so for quite a while. From what I hear from musicians I know, this is not atypical. I suspect the genre in which an engineer primarily works has something to do with this.
As you note, our frequency sensitivity flattens out at higher volumes. This is why [pop] recordings are meant to be played loud. -- a flat frequency distribution is intuitively more universal than mastering for the vagaries of a given volume
But you don't have to take my word for it -- look at any cheap stereo system. You'll find a "loud" or "d-bass" button, or a "tone" knob, or just the usual treble and bass sliders. The purpose of all of these is the same: they jack up the low and high end to simulate the frequency response curve you'd get if you played the recording loudly -- the way it was recorded. Referring to the inner ear's clamping abilities was overstating my case -- but I would still say most popular music is recorded to ideally be played louder than it typically is.
As most folks here probably know, your ears' frequency transform functions are not linear. Some frequency ranges are relatively louder at different volumes than others.
Another factor is the "lockdown" effect -- if you listen to a loud sound source for a long enough period of time your inner ear actually tenses up, limiting the range of motion of the ossicles (you know.. hammer, anvil, stirrup) to prevent damage to your cochlea. The effect of this is damping of certain frequencies, and a HUGE difference in your personal frequency transform.
One could take these frequency transformations into account and master a CD to be played softly... but no one does. If you get a chance to sit in a studio while an album is being recorded or mastered you'll be *amazed* how loud they play the music they're working with. I guess they can hear every detail that way -- until it damages their hearing, of course, and they have to play it even LOUDER.
Point is, professionals master recordings with the studio in mind as an ideal listening environment, which means loud, which means a particular frequency transform -- which means in order to hear the music as it's intended, it needs to be played loudly.
I think you're viewing this in overly technical terms. I doubt the CD would have to be in your drive for it to be available. I suspect users would mail in a signed contract essentially giving control of their music collection to snapster, then probably scan their CD's, one by one, in the drive to establish ownership with the system. The CDs could then be kept out of the machine -- perhaps to be "checked out" by the owner prior to playing any of them on his own equipment.
Obviously compliance would be an issue, but if some miscreant decided to label his CDs as available on Snapster and then use them for his own purposes at the same time -- well, it's an open question as to whether he or snapster would be culpable, but more to the point, it'd be impossible for the industry to catch anyone in the act.
A friend of mine's got one of these cable company supplied DVRs (from Comcast, DC area). I believe it's from Scientific Atlanta, although I don't know the model number.
His unit, at least, is not very good. It does have two tuners, but the response time of the OS is *very* slow -- if you're recording a show, there can be a 1+ second lag between when you hit a number of the remote and the system recognizes that you've done so! Enter commands too quickly and it'll just stop responding; you've then gotta reboot the damn thing. The compression also leaves a lot to be desired -- lots of artifacts -- although this may be the cable company's fault, not the DVR's.
The convenience of a DVR is still there, but don't kid yourself -- even ignoring the lack of a comparable programming guide, these things are nowhere near as good as Tivo.
I don't buy the analogy between desktop and server market penetration. Servers interoperability is not an issue -- the standards for HTTP, SMTP, FTP aren't moving targets. MS networking standards are not as well supported by linux -- interoperability is far from assured. The point is that dropping the odd linux server into your data center is unlikely to be as big a hassle as getting a working desktop install, and the average desktop user is much less technically sophisticated than the average person responsible for making changes to a company's server farm.
Besides, aesthetics don't matter for server UI the same way they do for desktops -- and although habituation to Windows is the main culprit, there is a lot more work to be done on a linux install to get what a normal desktop user would consider an equivalent aesthetic experience.
I suspect this article is simply borne of a new generation of employees coming up with a higher percentage falling under the "tech savvy" category and the traditional percentage falling under "bored at work"
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just organic molecules -- ie ones containing carbon. This is not talking about neural interfaces or anything like that.
What, do artists and social workers not pay taxes or buy groceries? Doubtless you view them as inessential parts of the economy -- but this is the result of how the market treats them, not the other way around. Does anyone really think these types of people would spend a smaller percentage of their income than, say, missile engineers?
Now, perhaps by merit of their industry you could say the engineer's field has the potential to create more wealth (he may distantly affect the fighter jet industry, etc). But really -- I think you'd be hard pressed to prove the engineer creates more wealth per dollar of salary than the social worked does.
you've oversimplified to the point that your argument has no meaning. Sure, missile designers pay their salaries back to taxes that can be used on social programs. But that hardly seems like an efficient way to fund those programs. Why don't we funnel the money through, I don't know, artists, or social workers instead of Lockheed Martin employees? Or just spend it on the damn programs in the first place.
I own a GC and love it, but everything I've read points to this platform being the one with the most tenuous grasp on the retail market at the moment. Nintendo is a relatively healthy company, but that's mostly because it moves HUGE numbers of gameboys
but I've got to say I really love the morse code design, as well as the binary shirt
I think we're both probably overstating our cases to some extent. Full disclosure: my comments are based on a few semesters' worth of psychoacoustics classes and watching my friend's band record an album. Admittedly limited credentials :)
With that said, I don't think you're right when you say all engineers that work loud burn out. I can attest to the fact that don zientara -- producer for most of the dischord label's catalog (most notably including fugazi) -- works very loud and has been doing so for quite a while. From what I hear from musicians I know, this is not atypical. I suspect the genre in which an engineer primarily works has something to do with this.
As you note, our frequency sensitivity flattens out at higher volumes. This is why [pop] recordings are meant to be played loud. -- a flat frequency distribution is intuitively more universal than mastering for the vagaries of a given volume
But you don't have to take my word for it -- look at any cheap stereo system. You'll find a "loud" or "d-bass" button, or a "tone" knob, or just the usual treble and bass sliders. The purpose of all of these is the same: they jack up the low and high end to simulate the frequency response curve you'd get if you played the recording loudly -- the way it was recorded. Referring to the inner ear's clamping abilities was overstating my case -- but I would still say most popular music is recorded to ideally be played louder than it typically is.
As most folks here probably know, your ears' frequency transform functions are not linear. Some frequency ranges are relatively louder at different volumes than others.
Another factor is the "lockdown" effect -- if you listen to a loud sound source for a long enough period of time your inner ear actually tenses up, limiting the range of motion of the ossicles (you know.. hammer, anvil, stirrup) to prevent damage to your cochlea. The effect of this is damping of certain frequencies, and a HUGE difference in your personal frequency transform.
One could take these frequency transformations into account and master a CD to be played softly... but no one does. If you get a chance to sit in a studio while an album is being recorded or mastered you'll be *amazed* how loud they play the music they're working with. I guess they can hear every detail that way -- until it damages their hearing, of course, and they have to play it even LOUDER.
Point is, professionals master recordings with the studio in mind as an ideal listening environment, which means loud, which means a particular frequency transform -- which means in order to hear the music as it's intended, it needs to be played loudly.
I think you're viewing this in overly technical terms. I doubt the CD would have to be in your drive for it to be available. I suspect users would mail in a signed contract essentially giving control of their music collection to snapster, then probably scan their CD's, one by one, in the drive to establish ownership with the system. The CDs could then be kept out of the machine -- perhaps to be "checked out" by the owner prior to playing any of them on his own equipment.
Obviously compliance would be an issue, but if some miscreant decided to label his CDs as available on Snapster and then use them for his own purposes at the same time -- well, it's an open question as to whether he or snapster would be culpable, but more to the point, it'd be impossible for the industry to catch anyone in the act.
A friend of mine's got one of these cable company supplied DVRs (from Comcast, DC area). I believe it's from Scientific Atlanta, although I don't know the model number.
His unit, at least, is not very good. It does have two tuners, but the response time of the OS is *very* slow -- if you're recording a show, there can be a 1+ second lag between when you hit a number of the remote and the system recognizes that you've done so! Enter commands too quickly and it'll just stop responding; you've then gotta reboot the damn thing. The compression also leaves a lot to be desired -- lots of artifacts -- although this may be the cable company's fault, not the DVR's.
The convenience of a DVR is still there, but don't kid yourself -- even ignoring the lack of a comparable programming guide, these things are nowhere near as good as Tivo.
I don't buy the analogy between desktop and server market penetration. Servers interoperability is not an issue -- the standards for HTTP, SMTP, FTP aren't moving targets. MS networking standards are not as well supported by linux -- interoperability is far from assured. The point is that dropping the odd linux server into your data center is unlikely to be as big a hassle as getting a working desktop install, and the average desktop user is much less technically sophisticated than the average person responsible for making changes to a company's server farm.
Besides, aesthetics don't matter for server UI the same way they do for desktops -- and although habituation to Windows is the main culprit, there is a lot more work to be done on a linux install to get what a normal desktop user would consider an equivalent aesthetic experience.
I suspect this article is simply borne of a new generation of employees coming up with a higher percentage falling under the "tech savvy" category and the traditional percentage falling under "bored at work"