Marketing and morality are separate issues.
on
Piracy Economics
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· Score: 1
Apps like Cubase and Photoshop gained their dominance through piracy. It really doesn't matter what your moral stance is, when you're talking marketing history. It is completely irrelevant. It's a social and market fact, anyone who was around and aware during this growth era saw it, and if the companies themselves are/were smart enough to know/detect it, then it is up to them to craft their piracy policies. As someone said above, several companies had a pragmatic "two-faced" stance on piracy, and with good reason. Companies who ignore unconventional forms of viral marketing on the basis of morality, when the only thing that morality governs is their own leniency, are not very smart or open-minded companies. Again, morals are quite dandy, your mother is surely proud of you. But the issue of piracy as a marketing tactic should not be blurred by self-applied morality, if the goal is purely market share.
Let me take this opportunity to say GOOD FOR THEM! Employers should be allowed to do anything they want, even forcing people to work without being paid ever. I myself love to work without pay and I work constantly and feverishly with nothing but the greater good of my coworkers and my company's core values in mind. If hired, I promise to revolutionize all business processes within my reach, humbly giving all credit to my direct supervisor without so much as a peep of dissent. Furthermore, I tend to bring cookies and donuts to work almost every day, I wash people's cars in the parking lot, and I attend several different churches and lodges weekly because I appreciate the different spiritualities and diversities of people so much.
I'd rather have a reader that can be set to scroll things in one continuous marquee, with keys that can adjust the speed and stop the text temporarily. Anything like that exist? Can we dump Project Gutenberg into it?
Works to some extent, take a lot of maintenance and user participation, has falses, pisses off some innocent people whose sites get compromised and then added to the list, requires effort to get taken off the list. stopbadware.org is a partner with google and I think it's a great idea, but it's going to require a ton of maintenance and will not end up being the sort of thing that uses few enough resources to continue out of the goodness of one's heart, so partnering with Websense is smart. They already have over 77000 hosts listed on their site, and that is likely to keep going up and up.
What the fuck is up with youngish people on myspace and that seemingly insatiable need to upload pictures of themselves making that cheesy, purse-lipped "blue steel face?
Given that the original Americans moved here at least in part to escape the tyrannies of royalty, I can't imagine that American companies can be expected to give a flying shit what a king thinks. Thailand doesn't even have enough influence to get their tea into our harbor in the first place. Maybe this is some sort of international diplomatic comedy routine underway.
Exactly, one of the things the linux evangelists fail to realize is that all it takes for someone to avoid linux and stick with OSX or Windows, is for that person to like SPECIFIC tools more than they like linux. I don't particularly like using Windows for DAW, and I have been using linux since 1996, but some of the tools I use are very specialized, and they are just not developed for linux. And no, I don't want a substitute, just like I don't want Tasteeos at the supermarket when Cheerios are available. It's not the same, so please don't pretend it's the same. Vendor lock-in sucks but at the end of the day, I care about my own tools and work more than I care about "fighting the good fight" against Microsoft's increasingly oppressive and insecure operating system. If you hate it so much, write the vendors who are not writing and maintaining any unix ports, don't pester the users. A hammer is a hammer is a hammer to a busy workman, whether it's made in China, Mordor, or my ass.
I've seen meat beat about 4 times since the mid 90s, Jack has a sense for not only innovation but entertainment, even when the tools may be potentially uninteresting. He did a show on the Actual Sounds tour with the band playing behind a screen, and the live performance was interspersed with all sorts of video footage which was obviously from the video vault he'd compiled over the years (since many of the songs samples came from these clips.) I found the performance interesting in a creative way but somewhat disconnected in the "rock" sense. Meat beat usually has at least drumming going on, and their best performances are when Bansky joins them to dance.
As for the OP, I have been recording/mixing/producing all ITB (in the box) with Cubase and VSTi alone for about the last 4 years. I don't use laptops, but I would if I played live more often. A few years back the PCMCIA offerings for audio soundcards were terrible but since companies like RME and MAudio and even MOTU have come out with some really good laptop sound cards. A lot of artists these days are using laptops only for performance, many are just for show and are just playback of previous recordings, but apps like Ableton and Traktor DJ allow for a good bit of on the fly mixing and matching.
Ultimately though a laptop performance has to at least have some DVD video or it's boring to me. I actively avoid laptop performances, although several friends have stated that Autechre was their favorite performance of that sort. I don't need a band to have rock guitars being flayed about like penises or rock drummers twirling drumsticks and bashing snares covered in confetti or anything, but there has to be an element of theatre, be it dancers, videos, or whatever for me to want to attend a show.
How is this niggling legal rationalization any different from the rationalizations I was talking about above? Bottom line is, you are taking something away from someone else when they do not want you to do so. Be a man and admit it, rather than falling back on dumb excuses. I don't care to judge people's ethics, but denial is annoying.
but if you are going to pass basically communist legislation and erase the financial incentive for the creation of intellectual property, you also have to accept the fact that the quality of that sort of work may no longer be professional. Sure, tons of people create amazing things as a labor of love, but the labor of finance is something which helps that love labor along. Would great bands like the Who have even persisted if they had no intellectual property rights during their heyday? Why is it that so many people I know are constantly complaining about the state of music today, and how much pop sucks, and yet so many also want to create a disincentive for artists to take on music making as a potential career? If you have ever put any love into a piece of artwork, you know inherently that you do not want OTHERS arbitrarily deciding what rights your work does and does not have...I mean you completely pulled it out of the ether, independently of them. I'm not rabid about file sharing but I'll tell you that I am sick and tired of the redundant, transparent, and cowardly rationalizations I read online, year after year, and I wish more people would just cowboy the fuck up and say "I felt like stealing something."
Since we know ads are not going to go away, I'm all for more targeted advertising. There is the worry that really good advertising might undermine one's self control and contribute to greater consumer debt, but that's really a self-discipline issue. I hate being advertised to, probably more so than anyone, but more so, I hate being encouraged to buy something completely irrelevant to me like I might see in some local commercial with terrible audio trying to sell me a Chevrolet Jimmy during a hockey game. Really, intelligent ads would be better for everyone because the industry would be more efficient, get more sales for less exposure, and so have to waste less money and create less annoyance. Of course, greed would probably dominate and the amount of advertisement would remain the same, people would just get poorer and have more crap in their attics...but for those with self-control I think their lives would actually end up being enriched and improved by smart ads. Still, no ads would be the preference...but this is a whore of a world, and there is currently no ferry to another one.
I'll mod this up, you needn't be an audiophile, but you'd better be at least somewhat audio aware. I hate the super nerd shit as much as anyone, but you just have to be able to understand where the point of diminishing returns lies.
At the very high end, pro audio is a waste of money designed to sucker in insecure people. But the performance difference between consumer grade and prosumer grade soundcards (and most other equipment) is quite noticeable, unless you're deaf. The evidence is right there in the specs, the THD, and the bit depth of the AD/DA. For instance IIRC most if not all of the Soundblaster cards have a 16 bit AD/DA, whereas something like the RME Hammerfall has 20bit AD/DA. For every 12dB of RMS in digital you lose 1 bit of resolution to aliasing, so if you are starting at 16bits for conversion, going to CD (16bits) you are already under using the medium at a RMS of just -12dB (which is very very common for modern mixes...many in the 80s and 90s were like -20.) Most ITB DAW software apps can process and export at 24, 32, and even 64 bits, so you are literally tossing that headroom away with a 16 bit soundcard. Sure, people listen to mp3s, but loss adds up.
If you're working at 16 bits, and your original recordings have entered the box at 16 bits through the AD, and then also your final recording has a low RMS (due to bad mixing and/or stubborn luddite hatred for compression and limiting in the mix) while playing out through a cheap 16 bit DA converter, you end up with a definitely very audible loss of clarity and stereo spectrum. The more dynamic/subtle a recording is (think jazz, classical) the worse this problem becomes. This problem is inherent to digital, it's the big tradeoff compared to analog, which has the noisefloor problem. When people complain of the "loudness wars" it is literally a problem inherent to the digital medium, which is why they ought to shut up or buy analog recordings. Or, you know, get smacked around with a large trout.
I record and mix at 24bit, with all VSTi, and with an app (SX3) that does all its internal processing at 32bit, and all this goes through a 20 bit RME AD/DA. Luckily all my shit is loud so loss is not a big problem.:D
Regardless of technical favoritism I think a lot of people here have probably worked at an ISP or other business where the change requesting and troubleshooting needs of larger customers was routinely given higher priority than the needs of smaller customers, regardless of the fact that the "priority levels" of both issues being the same...
I miss good old days, when all bots did was greet you, spit out dumb jokes, or print trite quotes on IRC.
!spin
!acro
!seen Bananarama
!cook me some bacon and eggs bitch
I read slashdot because the majority of posters are of above average intelligence, and are largely non-defensive people. The only problem is that a lot of people seem to talk emphatically on issues they don't actually understand fully, so there is a definite bullshit factor here. Trust me on this, I had like 5 psychology classes in college, I know what I am saying.
that there is more to life than trying to prove one's journeyman technical prowess by wasting all one's time sewing a patchwork when other people are paid to be seamstresses.
Ok I am no major bit nerd here, and I could be wrong about this, but isn't lossless "high-speed dubbing" for DAT not possible at 44.1kHz, due to the Nyquist Frequency? ie, the data is digital but the medium is still analog and increasing the speed of the tape heads causes the Nyquist to drop, causing aliasing?
Also, I really know noone who sends DAT masters anymore...unless they are a more traditional engineer doing analog recordings through a mixing board. YMMV, but in my world DAT has become irrelevant. Many people still use it due to habit and preference, and that's fine. But I prefer 100% ITB recording, and going out to a DAT requires extra studio real estate and maintenance of yet another studio device, when you could just produce a 48kHz.wav ITB (or 96..or 192, if you're really anal) and then SCP or FTP it to your duplicator or mastering engineer, saving several days and a few cents.
Slashdot Mirror
Apps like Cubase and Photoshop gained their dominance through piracy. It really doesn't matter what your moral stance is, when you're talking marketing history. It is completely irrelevant. It's a social and market fact, anyone who was around and aware during this growth era saw it, and if the companies themselves are/were smart enough to know/detect it, then it is up to them to craft their piracy policies. As someone said above, several companies had a pragmatic "two-faced" stance on piracy, and with good reason. Companies who ignore unconventional forms of viral marketing on the basis of morality, when the only thing that morality governs is their own leniency, are not very smart or open-minded companies. Again, morals are quite dandy, your mother is surely proud of you. But the issue of piracy as a marketing tactic should not be blurred by self-applied morality, if the goal is purely market share.
These posts are too long. Can you guys summarize, possibly include a .ppt or .vsd please.
Thanks
[signature.vcf]
Let me take this opportunity to say GOOD FOR THEM! Employers should be allowed to do anything they want, even forcing people to work without being paid ever. I myself love to work without pay and I work constantly and feverishly with nothing but the greater good of my coworkers and my company's core values in mind. If hired, I promise to revolutionize all business processes within my reach, humbly giving all credit to my direct supervisor without so much as a peep of dissent. Furthermore, I tend to bring cookies and donuts to work almost every day, I wash people's cars in the parking lot, and I attend several different churches and lodges weekly because I appreciate the different spiritualities and diversities of people so much.
I'd rather have a reader that can be set to scroll things in one continuous marquee, with keys that can adjust the speed and stop the text temporarily. Anything like that exist? Can we dump Project Gutenberg into it?
Works to some extent, take a lot of maintenance and user participation, has falses, pisses off some innocent people whose sites get compromised and then added to the list, requires effort to get taken off the list. stopbadware.org is a partner with google and I think it's a great idea, but it's going to require a ton of maintenance and will not end up being the sort of thing that uses few enough resources to continue out of the goodness of one's heart, so partnering with Websense is smart. They already have over 77000 hosts listed on their site, and that is likely to keep going up and up.
It already exists. http://firekeeper.mozdev.org/
What the fuck is up with youngish people on myspace and that seemingly insatiable need to upload pictures of themselves making that cheesy, purse-lipped "blue steel face?
Given that the original Americans moved here at least in part to escape the tyrannies of royalty, I can't imagine that American companies can be expected to give a flying shit what a king thinks. Thailand doesn't even have enough influence to get their tea into our harbor in the first place. Maybe this is some sort of international diplomatic comedy routine underway.
Exactly, one of the things the linux evangelists fail to realize is that all it takes for someone to avoid linux and stick with OSX or Windows, is for that person to like SPECIFIC tools more than they like linux. I don't particularly like using Windows for DAW, and I have been using linux since 1996, but some of the tools I use are very specialized, and they are just not developed for linux. And no, I don't want a substitute, just like I don't want Tasteeos at the supermarket when Cheerios are available. It's not the same, so please don't pretend it's the same. Vendor lock-in sucks but at the end of the day, I care about my own tools and work more than I care about "fighting the good fight" against Microsoft's increasingly oppressive and insecure operating system. If you hate it so much, write the vendors who are not writing and maintaining any unix ports, don't pester the users. A hammer is a hammer is a hammer to a busy workman, whether it's made in China, Mordor, or my ass.
I've seen meat beat about 4 times since the mid 90s, Jack has a sense for not only innovation but entertainment, even when the tools may be potentially uninteresting. He did a show on the Actual Sounds tour with the band playing behind a screen, and the live performance was interspersed with all sorts of video footage which was obviously from the video vault he'd compiled over the years (since many of the songs samples came from these clips.) I found the performance interesting in a creative way but somewhat disconnected in the "rock" sense. Meat beat usually has at least drumming going on, and their best performances are when Bansky joins them to dance. As for the OP, I have been recording/mixing/producing all ITB (in the box) with Cubase and VSTi alone for about the last 4 years. I don't use laptops, but I would if I played live more often. A few years back the PCMCIA offerings for audio soundcards were terrible but since companies like RME and MAudio and even MOTU have come out with some really good laptop sound cards. A lot of artists these days are using laptops only for performance, many are just for show and are just playback of previous recordings, but apps like Ableton and Traktor DJ allow for a good bit of on the fly mixing and matching. Ultimately though a laptop performance has to at least have some DVD video or it's boring to me. I actively avoid laptop performances, although several friends have stated that Autechre was their favorite performance of that sort. I don't need a band to have rock guitars being flayed about like penises or rock drummers twirling drumsticks and bashing snares covered in confetti or anything, but there has to be an element of theatre, be it dancers, videos, or whatever for me to want to attend a show.
Thanks for making sense...analog versus digital arguments give me about as much nausea as mac versus PC... You guys are like Pepto
How is this niggling legal rationalization any different from the rationalizations I was talking about above? Bottom line is, you are taking something away from someone else when they do not want you to do so. Be a man and admit it, rather than falling back on dumb excuses. I don't care to judge people's ethics, but denial is annoying.
but if you are going to pass basically communist legislation and erase the financial incentive for the creation of intellectual property, you also have to accept the fact that the quality of that sort of work may no longer be professional. Sure, tons of people create amazing things as a labor of love, but the labor of finance is something which helps that love labor along. Would great bands like the Who have even persisted if they had no intellectual property rights during their heyday? Why is it that so many people I know are constantly complaining about the state of music today, and how much pop sucks, and yet so many also want to create a disincentive for artists to take on music making as a potential career? If you have ever put any love into a piece of artwork, you know inherently that you do not want OTHERS arbitrarily deciding what rights your work does and does not have...I mean you completely pulled it out of the ether, independently of them. I'm not rabid about file sharing but I'll tell you that I am sick and tired of the redundant, transparent, and cowardly rationalizations I read online, year after year, and I wish more people would just cowboy the fuck up and say "I felt like stealing something."
and they ALL have mastered Photoshop.
Since we know ads are not going to go away, I'm all for more targeted advertising. There is the worry that really good advertising might undermine one's self control and contribute to greater consumer debt, but that's really a self-discipline issue. I hate being advertised to, probably more so than anyone, but more so, I hate being encouraged to buy something completely irrelevant to me like I might see in some local commercial with terrible audio trying to sell me a Chevrolet Jimmy during a hockey game. Really, intelligent ads would be better for everyone because the industry would be more efficient, get more sales for less exposure, and so have to waste less money and create less annoyance. Of course, greed would probably dominate and the amount of advertisement would remain the same, people would just get poorer and have more crap in their attics...but for those with self-control I think their lives would actually end up being enriched and improved by smart ads. Still, no ads would be the preference...but this is a whore of a world, and there is currently no ferry to another one.
I'll mod this up, you needn't be an audiophile, but you'd better be at least somewhat audio aware. I hate the super nerd shit as much as anyone, but you just have to be able to understand where the point of diminishing returns lies.
:D
At the very high end, pro audio is a waste of money designed to sucker in insecure people. But the performance difference between consumer grade and prosumer grade soundcards (and most other equipment) is quite noticeable, unless you're deaf. The evidence is right there in the specs, the THD, and the bit depth of the AD/DA. For instance IIRC most if not all of the Soundblaster cards have a 16 bit AD/DA, whereas something like the RME Hammerfall has 20bit AD/DA. For every 12dB of RMS in digital you lose 1 bit of resolution to aliasing, so if you are starting at 16bits for conversion, going to CD (16bits) you are already under using the medium at a RMS of just -12dB (which is very very common for modern mixes...many in the 80s and 90s were like -20.) Most ITB DAW software apps can process and export at 24, 32, and even 64 bits, so you are literally tossing that headroom away with a 16 bit soundcard. Sure, people listen to mp3s, but loss adds up.
If you're working at 16 bits, and your original recordings have entered the box at 16 bits through the AD, and then also your final recording has a low RMS (due to bad mixing and/or stubborn luddite hatred for compression and limiting in the mix) while playing out through a cheap 16 bit DA converter, you end up with a definitely very audible loss of clarity and stereo spectrum. The more dynamic/subtle a recording is (think jazz, classical) the worse this problem becomes. This problem is inherent to digital, it's the big tradeoff compared to analog, which has the noisefloor problem. When people complain of the "loudness wars" it is literally a problem inherent to the digital medium, which is why they ought to shut up or buy analog recordings. Or, you know, get smacked around with a large trout.
I record and mix at 24bit, with all VSTi, and with an app (SX3) that does all its internal processing at 32bit, and all this goes through a 20 bit RME AD/DA. Luckily all my shit is loud so loss is not a big problem.
ME BEING HUGE!! -1, offtopic
Regardless of technical favoritism I think a lot of people here have probably worked at an ISP or other business where the change requesting and troubleshooting needs of larger customers was routinely given higher priority than the needs of smaller customers, regardless of the fact that the "priority levels" of both issues being the same...
They probably did it because he was a DICK. Maybe he needs to look inward.
I miss good old days, when all bots did was greet you, spit out dumb jokes, or print trite quotes on IRC. !spin !acro !seen Bananarama !cook me some bacon and eggs bitch
I read slashdot because the majority of posters are of above average intelligence, and are largely non-defensive people. The only problem is that a lot of people seem to talk emphatically on issues they don't actually understand fully, so there is a definite bullshit factor here. Trust me on this, I had like 5 psychology classes in college, I know what I am saying.
detecting evidence of a similar nitrous leak approximately two years ago. Strangely, no leak was ever reported.
that there is more to life than trying to prove one's journeyman technical prowess by wasting all one's time sewing a patchwork when other people are paid to be seamstresses.
Ok I am no major bit nerd here, and I could be wrong about this, but isn't lossless "high-speed dubbing" for DAT not possible at 44.1kHz, due to the Nyquist Frequency? ie, the data is digital but the medium is still analog and increasing the speed of the tape heads causes the Nyquist to drop, causing aliasing?
.wav ITB (or 96..or 192, if you're really anal) and then SCP or FTP it to your duplicator or mastering engineer, saving several days and a few cents.
Also, I really know noone who sends DAT masters anymore...unless they are a more traditional engineer doing analog recordings through a mixing board. YMMV, but in my world DAT has become irrelevant. Many people still use it due to habit and preference, and that's fine. But I prefer 100% ITB recording, and going out to a DAT requires extra studio real estate and maintenance of yet another studio device, when you could just produce a 48kHz
but give us what we really want: space porn.