I Almost accepted a job with paypal last weel - Nice people, nice offices, lousy commute, but I really declined because it would have made me a small part of an already large venture, now that this is through I'd be an even smaller part of this grey commerce beast. (It was one of 4 offers)
How about some legislation to make music subscription services possible? The record companies have driven musicbank, myplay and napster out of business by making it impossible to get reasonable licensing terms. Legal distribution technology was built before napster ever appeared but the music business saw this as too much of a threat to do business with.
There should be legislation for a compulsory on-demand music license, a flat fee for one off streams and higher fees for downloads. Oh then they should fix up that silly CARP royalty rate so that we can have small stations again....
The DRm was needed to satisfy the big name record labels, but if you ever used the Napster Beta you'd see that most of the content was still in plain mp3.
I'd imagine that all the big label content would be in limited DRM format, and people would realise that the plain mp3's provided by smaller labels were better value for money. Next thing you know the community around napster would higlight the best mp3 content and some minor band - no stars - just talent would be making more money of the digital downlaods than the major labels.
Napster in the past showed that it could make significant changes to what people were listening to simply because it would provide more content than anywhere else and a collaborative filtering system through good old word of mouth. I wouldn't doubt that the label content and the napster brand would help attract the early users, but the more free content would probably become a more significant part of the service.
Hey it's a theory.
The real question is why did napster outsource all their DRM development to DWS, who in turn outsourced it to everyone else. this was a bad decision which led to problems when playmedia filed all sorts of lawsuits claiming they owned all the DRM technology - expect a DRM system from playmedia sometime soon.
Liveice Author + P2P + Geeza Job
on
P2P Internet Radio
·
· Score: 2, Offtopic
Funnily enough I wrote my first live mp3 streaming system back in '97 - in the days before any players supported http streaming. So I hacked on the mp3serv daemon so that you could recieve a stream and send it to stdout. I never disabled the rebroadcast code so my first few braodcasts ended up with a few listeners who were automatically rebroadcasting....
It would have been revolutionary to actually index the rebradcasters, but I guess my astronomy got in the way and it never happened.
It was about 18 months later that Slashdot put up a headline about the release of shoutcast - 'live mp3'.... You know me... been there, done that etc;-) So I ended up hacking bits of icecast for a while before abandoning my PhD on killer asteroids to work for internet music companies.
Anyway.... Now that napster has imploded I'm looking for a job in the bay area - given my groundbreaking work on mp3 radio and p2p networks there must be someone out there with a job for me right?????
Bill is an astronomer who writes scientifically orientated thrillers - 'Nemesis' is about a killer asteroid with an interesting twist, Bill is a specialist in impact catastrophes and this book really shows this off.
He's also released 'Revelations' - another thriller aroudn the theme of zero point energy, and most recently 'The Lure' takes an interesting angle on messages from other races....
Slashdot fans will love these, the hero in Nemesis is a Linux user too....
I rememebr this, it used to sit at the front of the old Kelvin Lecture theater before the remodelled it, in fact it sat out in the open and it was pretty much gathering dust. It was more like a little series of steps, pitch had been placed in a reservoir at one end and had flowed down the steps into the reservoir at the other end. In fact it had started overflowing at the bottom.
Bernard Cribbins? Is there any artist who would be more appropriate to Slashdot? I mean this guy helped Dr Who defeat the Daleks....
Anyway this is a huge problem with the online subscription services - they're only listing stuff that they've legally cleared. All new contracts contain some sort of digital clause, but older contracts require a lawyer digging through paperwork and finding the rights holders. All of this takes time and money, and for many older artists the return on this investment isn't going to happen in a reasonable time.
The US needs some sort of compulsory license for old and out of print media - soemthing that ensures the these things are never lost to the world.
OK.... maybe I'm bitter, but being a long term Open Source hacker (Icecast, Liveice, Cgicast etc), EFF donator, and DJ in San Francisco you'd imagine there'd be some room for me on the DJ lineup. Hell the DNA Lounge even uses streaming software descended from my first open source mp3 streaming code.
Hell - I even released the first open source software that let people DJ live with mpeg audio (back then layer 2 was more established and needed less CPU). Since then I've reverted to good old vinyl, but Kid 606 is one of the better known DJ's who are forging new paths in live vinyl free performances.
Oh... and I don't suck either.... (listen to me a DJSnM.com)
Hell.... I'll DJ *and* fight Wil Wheaton and Barney at the same time....
The Corporate Anthem Is Alive And Well
on
H2K2 Wrapup
·
· Score: 2
Top 20 IT Anthems features the best/worst of them all, music created by overbudgeted tech company PR groups who clearly need hitting with the reality stick a few times. Most famous of course is KPMG - with "Our Vision Of Global Strategy" - the title almost rhymes with KPMG. This monster sounds like "We Are The World" for world domination - this has proven so popular that it's even had Jungle and Rock remixes produced.
OK.... everyone.... 1, 2, 3....
KPMG, we're strong as can be A team of power and energy We go for the gold Together we hold onto our vision of global strategy.
Rock is coming back... yep Mary Anne Does her rock show, and there's Steve Lamaq's evening sessions which covers plenty of rock. There's also now a specialist Punk show called the Lock Up.
I used to be a hge rock fan, listening to Tommy Vance and Alan Freeman every week, I kinda stopped all that when I started DJ'ing.
HOUSE MUSIC DID NOT START IN FLORIDA
on
Electronic Music 101?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It was the Warehouse in Chicago.... a Glaring mistake in an otherwise excellent post
It's not exactly the most undeground site in the world, but the quality of the music and info is first class - the BBC Radio 1 website covers the UK's #1 modern music station. During the day it plays very mainstream material, but at nights a load of specialist shows come on including a lot of dance music.
Pete Tong's friday night show is considered something of a trendsetter, while shows like Gile's Petersons Worldwide, Mary Anne Hobbes Breezeblock and the Unstoppable Annie Nightingale explore other parts of the music. This week they're also spending the weekend at the love Parade in berlin - so expect lots of tough teutonic tech trance.
But! Best of all - Radio 1 is the home of the Essential Mix - every week they give over 2 hours of airtime to a featured DJ who gets to play what they like, without any Ads or jingles to get in the way. These shows are legendary, search on your favourite p2p network and you'll find them. The BBC even somewhat encourages taping of the shows - they used to get tape inlays published in major Dance music Magazines like Mixmag and Musik. If you can't find those then tracklistings.org have a fairly complete archive of who played what and when.
But... if you want to stay legit then Radio 1 has started storing the shows for a week so you can go in any time and listen to what you missed - it's all in real audio.... but don't balk just yet - Radio 1 was one of teh BBC stations participating in the OGG test earlier this year - so maybe if you e-mail the right people often enough then you'll get it back.
Other online dance music places I'd recommend are Groovetech which for me is mainly a place to buy vinyl, but they feature a lot of radio shows, extended samples and interviews. LiveDJs.com used to be good, but has kinda died out - I even played a few gigs there. Epitonic has a neat feature for newbies - they have little streams which basically introduce particular genres of music - they also have quite a lot of free tracks to try.
On the Musical recommendations side - I'm big into breakbeat right now - look for artists like Hybrid, BT, Plump DJ's or compilations like Y4K. I'd love to point people at a.ogg of a CD mix I did on www.djsnm.com - but the last time I put a direct link from slashdot I almost exceeded my Bandwidth limits.
I've been a DJ for years, I plyed old school raves in the UK, evaded police and escaped with my record collection.... and I still play the latest stuff now I'm in San Francisco. Come out to An Sibin (1176 Sutter at Polk) on Monday nights and catch my weekly gig.
Every year I drive to defcon from San Francisco - every year I have the same 'what if we could network the caravan' conversation - every year we plan to do it next year.
Bob Cringely should ride along with me this year - maybe it'll happen at long last.
The difference is that napster never tried to get licences before launching, Myplay spent their whole life in negotiations with record companies but rotted away.
Shame - they were the best group of peopel I ever worked with.
I used this for a couple of years at my last job and it's an excellent product. I used to hate source control systems - especially CVS, but Bitkeeper works excellently.
The main problem is deploying the first strand, their design doesn't balance the stresses out, so the cable will break. Later deployment must carry the cable to be deployed on a drum - they can't pull it up behind it. So I'm not sure if they can get away with the weight budget when you factor in a deployment vehicle.
THe Cable is thickest at geostationary altitude and thinnest at the anchor points, so the wave will actually concentrate as it propagates. It's like a detonation wave in explosives - the wave is powered as it passes through the material
One big issue they missed is the fact that a carbon nanotube cable still isn't strong enough to support it's own weight without tapering the cable correctly, at the middle it has to be about 10 times thicker because the stresser are highest at geostationary orbit.
The deployment method they're using doesn't take account of the fact that you need the thickest part to always be at the middle - if you simply unroll it the way they suggest then the incorrect thickness profile will result in the cable exceeding it's breaking point and snapping.
What they need to do is unfurl a cable like this from geostationary orbit simultaneously up and down at the same time. The Mechanism to do this would have to be very delicate at unfurling the last kink or the cable will again snap.
The cool thing about this is if you figure out what kind of weight you want the cable to support then you can come up with an idea of the amount of energy stored in the tension. If the cable snapped at any point then the amount of energy released would be pretty phenomenal. From each end of the snap you'd generate a compression wave which would get stronger as it travelled along the cable, after a while of picking up energy it may turn into a shockwave and snap the cable again (essentially shattering the cable). If it doesn't then the wave will have energy equivalent to nuclear weapons when it reaches the endpoints and the waves transmit themselves into the supporting structure....
He plays the most eclecytic music of any DJ in the world - if this were the only good thing the BBC did then the BBC would be a great organisation.....
He's on Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday every week from 10-12 gmt.
I've been listening to the vorbis stream for a while now - we were never quite sure whether wewanted teh server slashdotted or not - I guess christmas day will be quieter than usual. But I think the resources available are a lot more limited than the real or wimpy machines.
Oh yeah - make sure to e-mail the people in charge about how you prefer this over Real (and even moreso over WMP)
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of which - I wonder if e-Bay will ever become big enough to start standing up to those Microsoft complaints? My Old Windows Licenses aren't doing me any good....
. And of course fix those neutral ratings against Microsoft's e-bay account
I Almost accepted a job with paypal last weel - Nice people, nice offices, lousy commute, but I really declined because it would have made me a small part of an already large venture, now that this is through I'd be an even smaller part of this grey commerce beast. (It was one of 4 offers)
How about some legislation to make music subscription services possible? The record companies have driven musicbank, myplay and napster out of business by making it impossible to get reasonable licensing terms. Legal distribution technology was built before napster ever appeared but the music business saw this as too much of a threat to do business with.
There should be legislation for a compulsory on-demand music license, a flat fee for one off streams and higher fees for downloads. Oh then they should fix up that silly CARP royalty rate so that we can have small stations again....
The DRm was needed to satisfy the big name record labels, but if you ever used the Napster Beta you'd see that most of the content was still in plain mp3.
I'd imagine that all the big label content would be in limited DRM format, and people would realise that the plain mp3's provided by smaller labels were better value for money. Next thing you know the community around napster would higlight the best mp3 content and some minor band - no stars - just talent would be making more money of the digital downlaods than the major labels.
Napster in the past showed that it could make significant changes to what people were listening to simply because it would provide more content than anywhere else and a collaborative filtering system through good old word of mouth. I wouldn't doubt that the label content and the napster brand would help attract the early users, but the more free content would probably become a more significant part of the service.
Hey it's a theory.
The real question is why did napster outsource all their DRM development to DWS, who in turn outsourced it to everyone else. this was a bad decision which led to problems when playmedia filed all sorts of lawsuits claiming they owned all the DRM technology - expect a DRM system from playmedia sometime soon.
Funnily enough I wrote my first live mp3 streaming system back in '97 - in the days before any players supported http streaming. So I hacked on the mp3serv daemon so that you could recieve a stream and send it to stdout. I never disabled the rebroadcast code so my first few braodcasts ended up with a few listeners who were automatically rebroadcasting....
;-) So I ended up hacking bits of icecast for a while before abandoning my PhD on killer asteroids to work for internet music companies.
It would have been revolutionary to actually index the rebradcasters, but I guess my astronomy got in the way and it never happened.
It was about 18 months later that Slashdot put up a headline about the release of shoutcast - 'live mp3'.... You know me... been there, done that etc
Anyway.... Now that napster has imploded I'm looking for a job in the bay area - given my groundbreaking work on mp3 radio and p2p networks there must be someone out there with a job for me right?????
Peace PPL
Bill is an astronomer who writes scientifically orientated thrillers - 'Nemesis' is about a killer asteroid with an interesting twist, Bill is a specialist in impact catastrophes and this book really shows this off.
He's also released 'Revelations' - another thriller aroudn the theme of zero point energy, and most recently 'The Lure' takes an interesting angle on messages from other races....
Slashdot fans will love these, the hero in Nemesis is a Linux user too....
Unless of course you know it's a joke right?
I rememebr this, it used to sit at the front of the old Kelvin Lecture theater before the remodelled it, in fact it sat out in the open and it was pretty much gathering dust.
It was more like a little series of steps, pitch had been placed in a reservoir at one end and had flowed down the steps into the reservoir at the other end. In fact it had started overflowing at the bottom.
'Bertlesmann Pulls Plug On Napster' - Well our Judicial system poured cold water on that Idea....
Still I do like the way that the laid off staff all posed for a group photo for the photographers who turned up to cover teh story - Rock on!
Great Bunch of ppl
Now - has anyone got a job for an ex-napster employee?
Now put them down and get writing to the manufacturing companies!
OH MY God!
Bernard Cribbins? Is there any artist who would be more appropriate to Slashdot? I mean this guy helped Dr Who defeat the Daleks....
Anyway this is a huge problem with the online subscription services - they're only listing stuff that they've legally cleared. All new contracts contain some sort of digital clause, but older contracts require a lawyer digging through paperwork and finding the rights holders. All of this takes time and money, and for many older artists the return on this investment isn't going to happen in a reasonable time.
The US needs some sort of compulsory license for old and out of print media - soemthing that ensures the these things are never lost to the world.
It'd be nice not to have to go and find another job....
OK.... maybe I'm bitter, but being a long term Open Source hacker (Icecast, Liveice, Cgicast etc), EFF donator, and DJ in San Francisco you'd imagine there'd be some room for me on the DJ lineup. Hell the DNA Lounge even uses streaming software descended from my first open source mp3 streaming code.
Hell - I even released the first open source software that let people DJ live with mpeg audio (back then layer 2 was more established and needed less CPU). Since then I've reverted to good old vinyl, but Kid 606 is one of the better known DJ's who are forging new paths in live vinyl free performances.
Oh... and I don't suck either.... (listen to me a DJSnM.com)
Hell.... I'll DJ *and* fight Wil Wheaton and Barney at the same time....
Top 20 IT Anthems features the best/worst of them all, music created by overbudgeted tech company PR groups who clearly need hitting with the reality stick a few times. Most famous of course is KPMG - with "Our Vision Of Global Strategy" - the title almost rhymes with KPMG. This monster sounds like "We Are The World" for world domination - this has proven so popular that it's even had Jungle and Rock remixes produced.
OK.... everyone.... 1, 2, 3....
KPMG, we're strong as can be
A team of power and energy
We go for the gold
Together we hold onto our vision of global strategy.
Rock is coming back... yep Mary Anne Does her rock show, and there's Steve Lamaq's evening sessions which covers plenty of rock. There's also now a specialist Punk show called the Lock Up.
I used to be a hge rock fan, listening to Tommy Vance and Alan Freeman every week, I kinda stopped all that when I started DJ'ing.
It was the Warehouse in Chicago.... a Glaring mistake in an otherwise excellent post
It's not exactly the most undeground site in the world, but the quality of the music and info is first class - the BBC Radio 1 website covers the UK's #1 modern music station. During the day it plays very mainstream material, but at nights a load of specialist shows come on including a lot of dance music.
.ogg of a CD mix I did on www.djsnm.com - but the last time I put a direct link from slashdot I almost exceeded my Bandwidth limits.
Pete Tong's friday night show is considered something of a trendsetter, while shows like Gile's Petersons Worldwide, Mary Anne Hobbes Breezeblock and the Unstoppable Annie Nightingale explore other parts of the music. This week they're also spending the weekend at the love Parade in berlin - so expect lots of tough teutonic tech trance.
But! Best of all - Radio 1 is the home of the Essential Mix - every week they give over 2 hours of airtime to a featured DJ who gets to play what they like, without any Ads or jingles to get in the way. These shows are legendary, search on your favourite p2p network and you'll find them. The BBC even somewhat encourages taping of the shows - they used to get tape inlays published in major Dance music Magazines like Mixmag and Musik. If you can't find those then tracklistings.org have a fairly complete archive of who played what and when.
But... if you want to stay legit then Radio 1 has started storing the shows for a week so you can go in any time and listen to what you missed - it's all in real audio.... but don't balk just yet - Radio 1 was one of teh BBC stations participating in the OGG test earlier this year - so maybe if you e-mail the right people often enough then you'll get it back.
Other online dance music places I'd recommend are Groovetech which for me is mainly a place to buy vinyl, but they feature a lot of radio shows, extended samples and interviews. LiveDJs.com used to be good, but has kinda died out - I even played a few gigs there. Epitonic has a neat feature for newbies - they have little streams which basically introduce particular genres of music - they also have quite a lot of free tracks to try.
On the Musical recommendations side - I'm big into breakbeat right now - look for artists like Hybrid, BT, Plump DJ's or compilations like Y4K. I'd love to point people at a
I've been a DJ for years, I plyed old school raves in the UK, evaded police and escaped with my record collection.... and I still play the latest stuff now I'm in San Francisco. Come out to An Sibin (1176 Sutter at Polk) on Monday nights and catch my weekly gig.
Don't worry - now it's posted here the website won't be up long enough for too many non-slashdotters to read the results.
Every year I drive to defcon from San Francisco - every year I have the same 'what if we could network the caravan' conversation - every year we plan to do it next year.
Bob Cringely should ride along with me this year - maybe it'll happen at long last.
The difference is that napster never tried to get licences before launching, Myplay spent their whole life in negotiations with record companies but rotted away.
Shame - they were the best group of peopel I ever worked with.
I used this for a couple of years at my last job and it's an excellent product. I used to hate source control systems - especially CVS, but Bitkeeper works excellently.
The main problem is deploying the first strand, their design doesn't balance the stresses out, so the cable will break. Later deployment must carry the cable to be deployed on a drum - they can't pull it up behind it. So I'm not sure if they can get away with the weight budget when you factor in a deployment vehicle.
THe Cable is thickest at geostationary altitude and thinnest at the anchor points, so the wave will actually concentrate as it propagates. It's like a detonation wave in explosives - the wave is powered as it passes through the material
One big issue they missed is the fact that a carbon nanotube cable still isn't strong enough to support it's own weight without tapering the cable correctly, at the middle it has to be about 10 times thicker because the stresser are highest at geostationary orbit.
The deployment method they're using doesn't take account of the fact that you need the thickest part to always be at the middle - if you simply unroll it the way they suggest then the incorrect thickness profile will result in the cable exceeding it's breaking point and snapping.
What they need to do is unfurl a cable like this from geostationary orbit simultaneously up and down at the same time. The Mechanism to do this would have to be very delicate at unfurling the last kink or the cable will again snap.
The cool thing about this is if you figure out what kind of weight you want the cable to support then you can come up with an idea of the amount of energy stored in the tension. If the cable snapped at any point then the amount of energy released would be pretty phenomenal. From each end of the snap you'd generate a compression wave which would get stronger as it travelled along the cable, after a while of picking up energy it may turn into a shockwave and snap the cable again (essentially shattering the cable). If it doesn't then the wave will have energy equivalent to nuclear weapons when it reaches the endpoints and the waves transmit themselves into the supporting structure....
The music is john peel - some of it is pretty warped and warbly before the encoder gets to it
He plays the most eclecytic music of any DJ in the world - if this were the only good thing the BBC did then the BBC would be a great organisation.....
He's on Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday every week from 10-12 gmt.
I've been listening to the vorbis stream for a while now - we were never quite sure whether wewanted teh server slashdotted or not - I guess christmas day will be quieter than usual. But I think the resources available are a lot more limited than the real or wimpy machines.
Oh yeah - make sure to e-mail the people in charge about how you prefer this over Real (and even moreso over WMP)