...you lick his backside! I agree -- not an appealing idea. (Now just wait for someone to suggest licking Natalie Portman's backside...but I digress:-)
Check all your facts again, starting with being an AC. I ain't. Read carefully. Then read what I said in the message again. Carefully. You do NOT hear the One True Sound just because you play vinyl. You simply hear The Vinyl Sound, modified by the recording setup, modified by your playback setup. It is NOT the One True Sound. Only the original performance is The One True Sound.
A recording is meant to distribute the sound in time and space, so more people can hear a performance, and hear it when they want, and more than once. Vinyl wears out. The closest vinyl will get to The One True Sound is the first playback, and then only a direct to disk with limited copies. Your second playback will not sound as good as the first. And if this is how you want to listen to a performance, and you have the bucks, then you also have the bucks to simply hire the artist for a live performance.
Any playback, vinyl or CD, goes thru so many imperfect steps, and depends on speakers which don't even come close to The One True Sound, that if you like fancy schmancy playback methods, it's because you like that sound, NOT because that sound is closer to The One True Sound.
I don't doubt you can hear a difference. But you do not hear The One And Only True Sound. I do not believe that the mechanical mastering and playback process is that good. I do not believe you can hear.004% distortion or whatever the figures are for current amps. And I do not believe that the speakers are so good that the amp distortion is even discernible. If there really were such a thing as The One And Only True Sound, there would be only One True Speaker.
What I sneer at is idiots who waste money on concrete bunkers, separate pole transformers, etc, when the wear of each playback makes the next one worse, and when all that money could have gone into a filtered container for all that vinyl, so it would sound better the tenth time than the dirty one sounds the second time. I suppose the ultimate is to record direct to vinyl (could you get even a hundred copies for each recording?) and one playback, then toss it out and buy another. When you get to that level, you'd be better off hiring the artists in the first place and skip the damned one-shot recording. Is there any point in having a playback room of better quality than the recording studio, or the concert hall?
The point of a recording is to get a wider audience, in both time and space. A recording which is only good for one playback because the playback wears it out is pretty useless in my book.
Many years ago I stumbled across a magazine called (I think) High End. Amazing fun. People who built $250,000 listening rooms, people who would not even have light dimmers in their house because someone might use it and disrupt their listening pleasure, mono tube amps and vinyl players only (no radio; no CDs; not even tape, IIRC), people who bitched because they couldn't get Con Edison to give them two transformers at the power pole.
In other words, people with way more money than brains.
Basically they claim to have golden ears which are not satisfied with any recordings except live to master to vinyl. These idiots spent tens of thousands of dollars just for a stylus, not to mention more tens of thousands for the tone arm and huge block of granite for a base.
I might allow that the very first listening of a vinyl record might seem better than a CD, but not the 2nd or subsequent ones. So that's why the laser turntable -- no mechanical wear.
But this only applies if there's no dust on the vinyl, which explains the emphasis on its vacuum cleaner. I doubt that's really good enough. I often wondered, reading those couple of High End issues, how much it would have cost these suckers to build a clean room for their collection, with rubber gloves to access the vinyl and place it on the turntable.
The DMCA, as I understand it, eliminates a lot of reverse engineering, but this Connectix thing happened before it came into effect. I personally think the DMCA has a good chance of eventually being thrown out as unconstitutional, but until then, it will make a mess.
It is 100% nurture, 0% nature. If you doubt that, then please explain why the religion of the child is so closely related to its upbringing:-)
Therefore I suggest the onus is on religious people to explain the anomaly of having acquired religion, whether christian, buddhist, or atheist.
And there are alternatives to being EITHER religious OR an atheist. I am areligious. I simply have no religion. It is not a part of my life. I don't care what you believe for or against.
If there are no gods, then I have lost nothing.
If there are gods, then they are either good gods or bad gods.
Good gods won't punish me for being as they made me, so it does no harm to not bow down to them.
Unless/. were run by robots and had no ISPs to offend, it has always had constraints. If they hadn't sold to Andover, they'd have to be their own business managers and would have had less time to handle the geek side of/., so the Andover buyout preserved the geek side of/.
If you think the Andover buyout was teh beginnig of the end, then you must also want/. to stay static, never changing. You'd guarantee the geekiness and lose the future. You'd lose relevancy as the world changed, and/. would become worthless as a resource.
Imagine a/. equivalent for the telegraph age that refused to change when the telephone came in.
Other industries think 10 or 15% pre-tax margin is good, the computer industry thinks 10-15% post-tax is good, but M$ consistently reports 40+% post-tax profit. Got nothing to do with R&D.
IMHO Andover has palmed off some turkeys on slashdot in the guise of helping with the load. Roblimo is the prime example. I have gotten to the point of almost skipping his posts for their inflammability. It's as if Andover is trying to increase the circulation by hiring a headline writer away from the Weekly Weird News -- "World War Two Bomber Found on Moon!".
Other of his posts have also thrown inflammatory commentary into the pot. It smells of an insecurity, as if he's afraid no one will want to read the article unless there's some exciting nonsense to get the bile up.
I use RealPlayer to listen to Dr Demento, because otherwise I go thru withdrawal pains:-( Otherwise I don't use it or any of the others; I've seen too many reports of the sneaky crap they send back to HQ. Real's jukebox does it, and I remember M$ something did it. So no proprietary media player, except for my hypocritical addiction to staying demented....
I bought a dual PII box a year and a half ago, and to my surprise found a similarly specced Compaq box (NT of course:-) which was MORE expensive, by $500 or so, 3 months later. Not exactly the same equipment, but very close.
Ah well, I meant the mobile steam engine, both land and sea, not the stationary beasts. Power density and efficiency were much more important to trains and especially ships:-)
Most people don't know that a lot of motorcycle development was to set bicycle records. Bicyclists were the initial impetus for paved roads, and bicycles were possibly the first mass liberator of women and the poor.
She was married and divorced six times -- to... and lawyer Lewis W. Boies Jr
Could this lawyer be any relation to the Boies hired by the DoJ who did such a wonderful job against M$?
And moderators -- lighten up! laugh, it's funny!
:-):-):-)
--
Isn't this blown all out of proportion?
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 2
As I understand it, the slashdot "consensus" which the discussion thread refers to was that a company can sell a binary, built from GPLd sources, to the NSA (or anyone else), and only the customers can legally (by the GPL) demand to see the sources. No outsiders can.
So those GPLd changes are hidden from the world. They can only become liberated if the customer (NSA) chooses to release them, or if the originator sells the binaries to someone else who demands the sources, or if the NSA resells them to somebody who demands, and subsequently liberates, the sources.
At least that's how I understand it.
I don't appreciate this attitude on the company's and NSA's part, but it seems perfectly reasonable from a non-lawyer's legal point of view.
There seems to be a subplot that the employees who use the binaries are the ones who can demand to see the sources. I don't know about this; it seems to me the company (NSA) paid for them, so it's their choice.
Am I seeing this wrongly?
At any rate, altho I don't like the secretive attitude, it seems a very small hole, as only those products which are not sold to the general public, and probably only created on demand in the first place, are the ones which will never see the light of day. I simply don't see how this hurts much, and is certainly no reason to abandon the GPL.
I specifically said any silicon valley startup has more innovation than M$. You confused that with open source. 99% of the startups aren't open source.
Redmond doesn't innovate. They steal, buy, plunder, but they do not innovate.
You must be terribly naive to think those few words are the sole cause of this and other lawsuits and the terrible ill-will felt by most slashdotters and the larger computer community out there. How long have you been holed up in M$, getting all your outside info from the inhouse propaganda machine?
I have friends who lost a chance to start a company, and I lost a job, because the Venture Capitalists said it was too good an idea: as soon as it got big enough for M$ to notice, they'd make an unrefuseable offer, and the investors wouldn't get their money back. Do you enjoy working for a compnay with that reputation?
Do you have any idea how many companies were driven out of business by M$ vaporware announcements?
Do you have any idea how many companies had to choose between taking a lousy offer from M$ to buy up their technology or going out of business when M$ copied their work and gace it away?
Do you have any idea how many companies entered into investment negotiations with M$, only to find M$ backing out after seeing their secrets, and starting up a free inferior version, just to drive them out of business?
Buster, if you like your work, then you don't like being creative, except with the truth. Any 2 bit Silicon Vally startup shows more innovation in a month than M$ has in its entire history.
Enjoy your trailing edge work while you can. Be prepared to bail with your stock options fast, cuz when the share price starts sliding, it's gonna go fast. And I wouldn't bet on Balmer et al repricing your options to bail your ass out for you.
The cnet article says M$ says there will be a 3 cent per share charge. Multiply that by the number of shares. Pretty simple. Certainly not particularly precise: between 2.5 and 3.5 cents a share. But that's close enough for this kind of arithmetic. What more do you want?
Year and a half ago I bought a dual processor screamer with lots of extra goodies, and figured I was paying more for it. But several months later, I saw a Compaq box, similar set of goodies, for $500 more. Surprised me, but didn't upset me:-)
You are not obligated to continue as an MSN Internet Access member for any particular length of time; however, if for any reason whatsoever you do not continue for the period of time associated with the rebate that you have elected to receive, you agree that you will repay MSN the amount of the rebate immediately upon termination or cancellation of your MSN Internet Access account; provided that if you are a resident of California or Oregon you will not be required to repay the rebate amount.
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...you lick his backside! I agree -- not an appealing idea. (Now just wait for someone to suggest licking Natalie Portman's backside...but I digress :-)
--
Check all your facts again, starting with being an AC. I ain't. Read carefully. Then read what I said in the message again. Carefully. You do NOT hear the One True Sound just because you play vinyl. You simply hear The Vinyl Sound, modified by the recording setup, modified by your playback setup. It is NOT the One True Sound. Only the original performance is The One True Sound.
A recording is meant to distribute the sound in time and space, so more people can hear a performance, and hear it when they want, and more than once. Vinyl wears out. The closest vinyl will get to The One True Sound is the first playback, and then only a direct to disk with limited copies. Your second playback will not sound as good as the first. And if this is how you want to listen to a performance, and you have the bucks, then you also have the bucks to simply hire the artist for a live performance.
Any playback, vinyl or CD, goes thru so many imperfect steps, and depends on speakers which don't even come close to The One True Sound, that if you like fancy schmancy playback methods, it's because you like that sound, NOT because that sound is closer to The One True Sound.
--
I don't doubt you can hear a difference. But you do not hear The One And Only True Sound. I do not believe that the mechanical mastering and playback process is that good. I do not believe you can hear .004% distortion or whatever the figures are for current amps. And I do not believe that the speakers are so good that the amp distortion is even discernible. If there really were such a thing as The One And Only True Sound, there would be only One True Speaker.
What I sneer at is idiots who waste money on concrete bunkers, separate pole transformers, etc, when the wear of each playback makes the next one worse, and when all that money could have gone into a filtered container for all that vinyl, so it would sound better the tenth time than the dirty one sounds the second time. I suppose the ultimate is to record direct to vinyl (could you get even a hundred copies for each recording?) and one playback, then toss it out and buy another. When you get to that level, you'd be better off hiring the artists in the first place and skip the damned one-shot recording. Is there any point in having a playback room of better quality than the recording studio, or the concert hall?
The point of a recording is to get a wider audience, in both time and space. A recording which is only good for one playback because the playback wears it out is pretty useless in my book.
--
Many years ago I stumbled across a magazine called (I think) High End. Amazing fun. People who built $250,000 listening rooms, people who would not even have light dimmers in their house because someone might use it and disrupt their listening pleasure, mono tube amps and vinyl players only (no radio; no CDs; not even tape, IIRC), people who bitched because they couldn't get Con Edison to give them two transformers at the power pole.
In other words, people with way more money than brains.
Basically they claim to have golden ears which are not satisfied with any recordings except live to master to vinyl. These idiots spent tens of thousands of dollars just for a stylus, not to mention more tens of thousands for the tone arm and huge block of granite for a base.
I might allow that the very first listening of a vinyl record might seem better than a CD, but not the 2nd or subsequent ones. So that's why the laser turntable -- no mechanical wear.
But this only applies if there's no dust on the vinyl, which explains the emphasis on its vacuum cleaner. I doubt that's really good enough. I often wondered, reading those couple of High End issues, how much it would have cost these suckers to build a clean room for their collection, with rubber gloves to access the vinyl and place it on the turntable.
--
The DMCA, as I understand it, eliminates a lot of reverse engineering, but this Connectix thing happened before it came into effect. I personally think the DMCA has a good chance of eventually being thrown out as unconstitutional, but until then, it will make a mess.
--
It is 100% nurture, 0% nature. If you doubt that, then please explain why the religion of the child is so closely related to its upbringing :-)
:-)
Therefore I suggest the onus is on religious people to explain the anomaly of having acquired religion, whether christian, buddhist, or atheist.
And there are alternatives to being EITHER religious OR an atheist. I am areligious. I simply have no religion. It is not a part of my life. I don't care what you believe for or against.
If there are no gods, then I have lost nothing.
If there are gods, then they are either good gods or bad gods.
Good gods won't punish me for being as they made me, so it does no harm to not bow down to them.
Bad gods -- well, fsck them anyway
--
Geez I gotta do all the thinking around here? :-) :-)
:-)
--
Unless /. were run by robots and had no ISPs to offend, it has always had constraints. If they hadn't sold to Andover, they'd have to be their own business managers and would have had less time to handle the geek side of /., so the Andover buyout preserved the geek side of /.
/. to stay static, never changing. You'd guarantee the geekiness and lose the future. You'd lose relevancy as the world changed, and /. would become worthless as a resource.
/. equivalent for the telegraph age that refused to change when the telephone came in.
If you think the Andover buyout was teh beginnig of the end, then you must also want
Imagine a
--
Other industries think 10 or 15% pre-tax margin is good, the computer industry thinks 10-15% post-tax is good, but M$ consistently reports 40+% post-tax profit. Got nothing to do with R&D.
--
Right here
:-)
It's not the actual journal report, but a summary for civilians
--
Yeh, so moderate me down :-)
IMHO Andover has palmed off some turkeys on slashdot in the guise of helping with the load. Roblimo is the prime example. I have gotten to the point of almost skipping his posts for their inflammability. It's as if Andover is trying to increase the circulation by hiring a headline writer away from the Weekly Weird News -- "World War Two Bomber Found on Moon!".
Other of his posts have also thrown inflammatory commentary into the pot. It smells of an insecurity, as if he's afraid no one will want to read the article unless there's some exciting nonsense to get the bile up.
--
I use RealPlayer to listen to Dr Demento, because otherwise I go thru withdrawal pains :-( Otherwise I don't use it or any of the others; I've seen too many reports of the sneaky crap they send back to HQ. Real's jukebox does it, and I remember M$ something did it. So no proprietary media player, except for my hypocritical addiction to staying demented....
--
I bought a dual PII box a year and a half ago, and to my surprise found a similarly specced Compaq box (NT of course :-) which was MORE expensive, by $500 or so, 3 months later. Not exactly the same equipment, but very close.
--
Ah well, I meant the mobile steam engine, both land and sea, not the stationary beasts. Power density and efficiency were much more important to trains and especially ships :-)
Most people don't know that a lot of motorcycle development was to set bicycle records. Bicyclists were the initial impetus for paved roads, and bicycles were possibly the first mass liberator of women and the poor.
--
Steam engine
Electricity
Telegraph
Telephone
Cotton gin
Bessamer (sp?) process for steel
Camera
Safety bicycle
--
Here's a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle obit (near the bottom):
... and lawyer Lewis W. Boies Jr
:-) :-)
She was married and divorced six times -- to
Could this lawyer be any relation to the Boies hired by the DoJ who did such a wonderful job against M$?
And moderators -- lighten up! laugh, it's funny!
:-)
--
As I understand it, the slashdot "consensus" which the discussion thread refers to was that a company can sell a binary, built from GPLd sources, to the NSA (or anyone else), and only the customers can legally (by the GPL) demand to see the sources. No outsiders can.
So those GPLd changes are hidden from the world. They can only become liberated if the customer (NSA) chooses to release them, or if the originator sells the binaries to someone else who demands the sources, or if the NSA resells them to somebody who demands, and subsequently liberates, the sources.
At least that's how I understand it.
I don't appreciate this attitude on the company's and NSA's part, but it seems perfectly reasonable from a non-lawyer's legal point of view.
There seems to be a subplot that the employees who use the binaries are the ones who can demand to see the sources. I don't know about this; it seems to me the company (NSA) paid for them, so it's their choice.
Am I seeing this wrongly?
At any rate, altho I don't like the secretive attitude, it seems a very small hole, as only those products which are not sold to the general public, and probably only created on demand in the first place, are the ones which will never see the light of day. I simply don't see how this hurts much, and is certainly no reason to abandon the GPL.
--
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
In this case, perhaps better rephrased as
A great many people think the powers-that-be are seeing the light when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
--
VCs invest $5M. A year later, it gets M$ attention. They offer a choice: $5M or they develop (at much greater expense) their own hurry up version.
M$ has done this many times. Look up their record.
BTW, "unrefuseable offer" is a variation on the old Mafia phrase "an offer you can't refuse", meaning refusal is not a healthy option.
--
I specifically said any silicon valley startup has more innovation than M$. You confused that with open source. 99% of the startups aren't open source.
Redmond doesn't innovate. They steal, buy, plunder, but they do not innovate.
--
You must be terribly naive to think those few words are the sole cause of this and other lawsuits and the terrible ill-will felt by most slashdotters and the larger computer community out there. How long have you been holed up in M$, getting all your outside info from the inhouse propaganda machine?
I have friends who lost a chance to start a company, and I lost a job, because the Venture Capitalists said it was too good an idea: as soon as it got big enough for M$ to notice, they'd make an unrefuseable offer, and the investors wouldn't get their money back. Do you enjoy working for a compnay with that reputation?
Do you have any idea how many companies were driven out of business by M$ vaporware announcements?
Do you have any idea how many companies had to choose between taking a lousy offer from M$ to buy up their technology or going out of business when M$ copied their work and gace it away?
Do you have any idea how many companies entered into investment negotiations with M$, only to find M$ backing out after seeing their secrets, and starting up a free inferior version, just to drive them out of business?
Buster, if you like your work, then you don't like being creative, except with the truth. Any 2 bit Silicon Vally startup shows more innovation in a month than M$ has in its entire history.
Enjoy your trailing edge work while you can. Be prepared to bail with your stock options fast, cuz when the share price starts sliding, it's gonna go fast. And I wouldn't bet on Balmer et al repricing your options to bail your ass out for you.
--
The cnet article says M$ says there will be a 3 cent per share charge. Multiply that by the number of shares. Pretty simple. Certainly not particularly precise: between 2.5 and 3.5 cents a share. But that's close enough for this kind of arithmetic. What more do you want?
--
Year and a half ago I bought a dual processor screamer with lots of extra goodies, and figured I was paying more for it. But several months later, I saw a Compaq box, similar set of goodies, for $500 more. Surprised me, but didn't upset me :-)
--
Are there any particular projects or people who you would like to see nominated for an IgNobel prize?
:-)
(My apologies if Marc A of AIR has already asked this
--
Bold section is my emphasis --
You are not obligated to continue as an MSN Internet Access member for any particular length of time; however, if for any reason whatsoever you do not continue for the period of time associated with the rebate that you have elected to receive, you agree that you will repay MSN the amount of the rebate immediately upon termination or cancellation of your MSN Internet Access account; provided that if you are a resident of California or Oregon you will not be required to repay the rebate amount.
--