Posts
back in 1993, Dave Barry published a story in which he declared "Howdy Hooty Sapperticker" by "Barbara and the Boys" to be the worst song ever.
Well, here it is:
Hooty Sapperticker
it's definitely bad.
and apparently here's the B-side of the 45 of that. it's an instrumental, so not as interesting.
Cobra
Who'd have thought?
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Guild Wars etc
I had the opportunity to get a copy of Guild Wars for $10 after TG over at Best Buy. I did NOT go to their Midnight Madness sale (you know, where you have to go over there at midnight to get in line for the 4 am opening).
(This year I went to Office Depot, arriving at 5.30 for the 6am opening, 25 people ahead of me, where I was able to get a 24" LCD monitor, 1900x1200, for $280--oh is that nice. One bad pixel, stuck on green.)
After Office Depot, I went to BB to see how things looked, and saw that they had GW for $10, but the checkout line was at least 200 people long, so I went home. Later in the afternoon I went back and bought it. The installer was reasonably fast, but of course the first thing it wanted to do was 600 MB of updates. Hope my ISP doesn't object to these massive downloads...in under a week I've already had two more software updates downloaded, too. (This is just the original game, GOTY edition, but no expansions.)
So what's GW like? Well, it doesn't have a monthly charge, which works for me. Entropia didn't either, but it did have a business model aimed at making money for the developers, and the game was nearly opaque. GW doesn't have a business model like that at all--you buy the game, you play until ArenaNet/NCSoft shuts it all down in a few years (which you know they will at some point).
GW is Dungeon Siege 2 as MMO, only not as well done. Like Oblivion, the "Economy" isn't very interesting...not much you can spend money on that is worth spending money on. You battle monsters, they drop loot, you can't carry much so you have to leave things on the ground as you travel, because you can't run back to town and sell--that results in the monsters all being respawned. At least with DS2, you could run back and sell, and most of the monsters would not have respawned. In DS 1 there was no respawning at all, so it was easy to run back to sell, and there were probably things worth buying.
There's the "Crafting" opportunities, but they aren't that interesting, although that was how I got better armor-rating clothes.
DS 2 had better visuals overall, and better looking characters (although not equivalently customizable, but really, how valuable is that?) and gear.
That said, GW is pretty dang nice at 1900x1200. And it does run, unlike a couple of other recent games (FEAR and Bioshock). You don't get a larger field of view (what I would have liked), but you get a lot of extra space to push subwindows (like inventory, tasks) off into.
I've been playing for a few days, and am at level 10. You can get to level 7 by yourself, without much trouble (I did get killed and resurrected a couple of times). GW gives you a little more camera control than DS 1 or 2, but that doesn't amount to much other than being able to look uphill. Sometimes I found myself with the camera aimed somewhere and I couldn't see what was going on at all.
GW has a lot more going on in terms of tasks/quests you can do, but they all have the flaw of "Mr X asks you to do Y, and it's far away, and when you're done you have to go back to Mr X to get the reward" -- which can get tiresome. You can do a partial "fast travel" in GW, but Morrowind had the best deal there. Not all places can be fast-traveled to, and if you have to go the Location A twice, you will have to whack the same monsters each time. Well, that's ok if you are getting more XP each time, but eventually that stops, you are level-wise too far above creature Z but you still have to kill it. The 10th or 15th time you have to whack the same bunch of monsters is is REALLY old.
It's a lot less clear about your weapon damage and armor rating than DS 1|2. I really don't know what I have.
One interesting thing: in the opening "campaign" (i.e., "pre-searing"), the opponents are fairly stupid and work alone. "Post-searing", the opponents work together, and seem to be grouped in small squads, and if there's a cluster of sorts, when one is attacked the others all run over to help. Your 'bot henchmen are fairly weak, tho, I seem to always get Level 3 teammates, altho my "pet" is close behind me. (OK, this seems location specific, if I select teammates in Piken Square, they are level 6, but in Ascalon City they are level 3; you get to Yak's Bend and they are level 8, so presumably that continues to rise further through the game--but those levels are not sufficient to get you through the game).
Possibly the worst aspect of the game: if you get wiped out a couple of times, you have to go back to town to get a recharge, because your max health has been reduced, then you have to go back through all the same areas you already went through, kill the same monsters again, etc. If you have to do this a couple of times, you get sloppy and in too big a hurry and get wiped out again. My tolerance for this "do it all over again" routine is not too high.
And also weird: I seem to have found myself repeating a couple of missions. No idea why. I'm not objecting to the XP, but I'm beyond where the kills get my anything...I'd have thought that once done, formal missions could not be repeated. It turns out that most have "secondary missions" for 1000 XP, but you can't always go back to do them. You can if you restart the mission and had not received the secondary mission before; I was successful at that once, and not successful another time (turned out I had received the mission, and the NPC who gave it was gone the 2nd time). And you really have to be careful about picking up something a mission target might drop. Twice I've had to go back and redo a mission because I forgot to grab the item.
Visually there are some problems: The worst, I think, is that there are clipping issues. You can run right through other people or monsters, which means that you can't really play this in first-person view, because you might standing at the same ground x/y as the monster--or at least close enough for it to not be visible, then you don't know what you are swinging your sword at. And then you can't see your weapon either, so you don't really know where you're aiming. This would be relatively easily solved by having all characters have the equivalent stand-off distance as inanimate objects force on you to go around. It's really hard to select a target to hit when you are inside its 3D model and can't see it.
When you are on ground where the elevation varies a lot (or on a big monitor), you can all too easily see how the texture images for the rectangular segments get stretched. It'd be nice if they were more jpeg-ish, where they could scale better. Or to have more detailed textures for use on bigger monitors. Kinda like the port of Quake 1 into the Quake 2 engine, where the textures got doubled in resolution. Or you need to show a lot wider field of view.
and of course the bots run on Artificial Stupidity, just like everywhere else. Dungeon Siege did that better too--they'd do what I told them to do with less tendency to run into fights.
(only slightly related: Google for "Artificial Stupidity" -- some of the results are pretty funny)
(This year I went to Office Depot, arriving at 5.30 for the 6am opening, 25 people ahead of me, where I was able to get a 24" LCD monitor, 1900x1200, for $280--oh is that nice. One bad pixel, stuck on green.)
After Office Depot, I went to BB to see how things looked, and saw that they had GW for $10, but the checkout line was at least 200 people long, so I went home. Later in the afternoon I went back and bought it. The installer was reasonably fast, but of course the first thing it wanted to do was 600 MB of updates. Hope my ISP doesn't object to these massive downloads...in under a week I've already had two more software updates downloaded, too. (This is just the original game, GOTY edition, but no expansions.)
So what's GW like? Well, it doesn't have a monthly charge, which works for me. Entropia didn't either, but it did have a business model aimed at making money for the developers, and the game was nearly opaque. GW doesn't have a business model like that at all--you buy the game, you play until ArenaNet/NCSoft shuts it all down in a few years (which you know they will at some point).
GW is Dungeon Siege 2 as MMO, only not as well done. Like Oblivion, the "Economy" isn't very interesting...not much you can spend money on that is worth spending money on. You battle monsters, they drop loot, you can't carry much so you have to leave things on the ground as you travel, because you can't run back to town and sell--that results in the monsters all being respawned. At least with DS2, you could run back and sell, and most of the monsters would not have respawned. In DS 1 there was no respawning at all, so it was easy to run back to sell, and there were probably things worth buying.
There's the "Crafting" opportunities, but they aren't that interesting, although that was how I got better armor-rating clothes.
DS 2 had better visuals overall, and better looking characters (although not equivalently customizable, but really, how valuable is that?) and gear.
That said, GW is pretty dang nice at 1900x1200. And it does run, unlike a couple of other recent games (FEAR and Bioshock). You don't get a larger field of view (what I would have liked), but you get a lot of extra space to push subwindows (like inventory, tasks) off into.
I've been playing for a few days, and am at level 10. You can get to level 7 by yourself, without much trouble (I did get killed and resurrected a couple of times). GW gives you a little more camera control than DS 1 or 2, but that doesn't amount to much other than being able to look uphill. Sometimes I found myself with the camera aimed somewhere and I couldn't see what was going on at all.
GW has a lot more going on in terms of tasks/quests you can do, but they all have the flaw of "Mr X asks you to do Y, and it's far away, and when you're done you have to go back to Mr X to get the reward" -- which can get tiresome. You can do a partial "fast travel" in GW, but Morrowind had the best deal there. Not all places can be fast-traveled to, and if you have to go the Location A twice, you will have to whack the same monsters each time. Well, that's ok if you are getting more XP each time, but eventually that stops, you are level-wise too far above creature Z but you still have to kill it. The 10th or 15th time you have to whack the same bunch of monsters is is REALLY old.
It's a lot less clear about your weapon damage and armor rating than DS 1|2. I really don't know what I have.
One interesting thing: in the opening "campaign" (i.e., "pre-searing"), the opponents are fairly stupid and work alone. "Post-searing", the opponents work together, and seem to be grouped in small squads, and if there's a cluster of sorts, when one is attacked the others all run over to help. Your 'bot henchmen are fairly weak, tho, I seem to always get Level 3 teammates, altho my "pet" is close behind me. (OK, this seems location specific, if I select teammates in Piken Square, they are level 6, but in Ascalon City they are level 3; you get to Yak's Bend and they are level 8, so presumably that continues to rise further through the game--but those levels are not sufficient to get you through the game).
Possibly the worst aspect of the game: if you get wiped out a couple of times, you have to go back to town to get a recharge, because your max health has been reduced, then you have to go back through all the same areas you already went through, kill the same monsters again, etc. If you have to do this a couple of times, you get sloppy and in too big a hurry and get wiped out again. My tolerance for this "do it all over again" routine is not too high.
And also weird: I seem to have found myself repeating a couple of missions. No idea why. I'm not objecting to the XP, but I'm beyond where the kills get my anything...I'd have thought that once done, formal missions could not be repeated. It turns out that most have "secondary missions" for 1000 XP, but you can't always go back to do them. You can if you restart the mission and had not received the secondary mission before; I was successful at that once, and not successful another time (turned out I had received the mission, and the NPC who gave it was gone the 2nd time). And you really have to be careful about picking up something a mission target might drop. Twice I've had to go back and redo a mission because I forgot to grab the item.
Visually there are some problems: The worst, I think, is that there are clipping issues. You can run right through other people or monsters, which means that you can't really play this in first-person view, because you might standing at the same ground x/y as the monster--or at least close enough for it to not be visible, then you don't know what you are swinging your sword at. And then you can't see your weapon either, so you don't really know where you're aiming. This would be relatively easily solved by having all characters have the equivalent stand-off distance as inanimate objects force on you to go around. It's really hard to select a target to hit when you are inside its 3D model and can't see it.
When you are on ground where the elevation varies a lot (or on a big monitor), you can all too easily see how the texture images for the rectangular segments get stretched. It'd be nice if they were more jpeg-ish, where they could scale better. Or to have more detailed textures for use on bigger monitors. Kinda like the port of Quake 1 into the Quake 2 engine, where the textures got doubled in resolution. Or you need to show a lot wider field of view.
and of course the bots run on Artificial Stupidity, just like everywhere else. Dungeon Siege did that better too--they'd do what I told them to do with less tendency to run into fights.
(only slightly related: Google for "Artificial Stupidity" -- some of the results are pretty funny)
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
more free online music
This is a fabulous site: Wolfgang's Vault
you have probably never heard of or seen it. apparently the creator(s) somehow have access to all of Bill Graham's concert recordings from Fillmore East/West and Winterland. (Bill's birth name was Wolfgang)
so this website is how you get to listen to them all. It is an unbelievable collection of absolutely classic performances, a few of which have been released on CD in the past, and are known masterpieces (i.e., Allman Bros at Fillmore East).
there is of course some junk on there, but the things that are great are superb. The concerts play as flash-movies, so you can't just grab an mp3 file to download. A few are available for purchase, I don't know what file format you end up with. If you can rip an audio stream, that's likely to be a better approach.
you have probably never heard of or seen it. apparently the creator(s) somehow have access to all of Bill Graham's concert recordings from Fillmore East/West and Winterland. (Bill's birth name was Wolfgang)
so this website is how you get to listen to them all. It is an unbelievable collection of absolutely classic performances, a few of which have been released on CD in the past, and are known masterpieces (i.e., Allman Bros at Fillmore East).
there is of course some junk on there, but the things that are great are superb. The concerts play as flash-movies, so you can't just grab an mp3 file to download. A few are available for purchase, I don't know what file format you end up with. If you can rip an audio stream, that's likely to be a better approach.
Virtual World "games"
Having had a reason to look at Virtual World tools/games just recently (see "Change How We Teach"), I signed up for "Entropia Universe" because it's free. 2nd Life is free, too, but I tried this one first.
And it's just as bad as you might expect from something that costs nothing. I found it well-nigh unplayable, because the UI view and position jumped around like you wouldn't believe. I was trying to run, and it was like being John Cleese running up to the castle where he rescues the "maiden" in Holy Grail--I kept going back to a previous positions every couple of seconds...if I tried to turn, the camera view kept jumping back like I was rotating 90 degrees and then warping back where I started. This was intolerable.
The first time I was running it, things were fine, but that might have been time-of-day based, because it was at about 11pm EST. The really bad jumpiness was about 6pm EST, so I can imagine it being server-traffic/comm-delay/ping-time trouble. Not a good sign for a tool/game that wants to be taken seriously.
I'll try this again late tonight to see if time-of-day really does make a diff, but if it continues to be jumpy, it'll be time for "Add/Remove Programs". And then on to another one.
I have a project I'd like to try, but it necessitates having a good tool that can handle thousands of users/players simultaneously. It would run on a fiber-based network, so low ping would be the case all the time.
Several years ago I had a look at some other variation of this, an online 3D tool that one could make a game from, I do not remember the name. I recall it as something you could not actually do anything inside of, just run around, so all you saw were characters running and jumping.
Entropia seems like a cheap version of Oblivion, in which you can play a merchant as well as the main character. Otherwise, it's the same sort of thing only not as well done. You can collect things you find, kill critters (perhaps for loot), and sell things in town. From which you might buy weapons and armor. And you can learn to make things you could sell.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but: B-O-R-I-N-G. Surely there's something better...
------
Later: I rebooted PC, and restarted. The bad jumpiness went away, but it was still uninteresting. So I deleted it. I don't have time for this...
And it's just as bad as you might expect from something that costs nothing. I found it well-nigh unplayable, because the UI view and position jumped around like you wouldn't believe. I was trying to run, and it was like being John Cleese running up to the castle where he rescues the "maiden" in Holy Grail--I kept going back to a previous positions every couple of seconds...if I tried to turn, the camera view kept jumping back like I was rotating 90 degrees and then warping back where I started. This was intolerable.
The first time I was running it, things were fine, but that might have been time-of-day based, because it was at about 11pm EST. The really bad jumpiness was about 6pm EST, so I can imagine it being server-traffic/comm-delay/ping-time trouble. Not a good sign for a tool/game that wants to be taken seriously.
I'll try this again late tonight to see if time-of-day really does make a diff, but if it continues to be jumpy, it'll be time for "Add/Remove Programs". And then on to another one.
I have a project I'd like to try, but it necessitates having a good tool that can handle thousands of users/players simultaneously. It would run on a fiber-based network, so low ping would be the case all the time.
Several years ago I had a look at some other variation of this, an online 3D tool that one could make a game from, I do not remember the name. I recall it as something you could not actually do anything inside of, just run around, so all you saw were characters running and jumping.
Entropia seems like a cheap version of Oblivion, in which you can play a merchant as well as the main character. Otherwise, it's the same sort of thing only not as well done. You can collect things you find, kill critters (perhaps for loot), and sell things in town. From which you might buy weapons and armor. And you can learn to make things you could sell.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but: B-O-R-I-N-G. Surely there's something better...
------
Later: I rebooted PC, and restarted. The bad jumpiness went away, but it was still uninteresting. So I deleted it. I don't have time for this...
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Change how we teach
"We have to change how we teach because they have changed how they learn."
Phrase coined by me, on Nov 5, 2007.
This was a result of some discussion about using Virtual Worlds as training tools. It arose after an hour+ of discussion about VW-as-training, and someone saying a few things about how kids from little up to 22 or so have their brains getting wired differently because of early and continuous exposure to computers and electronic gadgets.
Virtual Worlds are implemented as something like a computer game, a la Oblivion (see other posts for thoughts on that game), or Second Life, which you can read about in the dead-tree newspapers.
I'm thinking this is a good idea, but it will of course not be trivial to implement such training. It will grow cheaper and more powerful over time, but at the moment, it ain't. Comparison: look at the credits list of names at the back of the Oblivion game book, and look at the credits list at the end of a mid-size Hollywood movie. Those lists are comparable in terms of number of people, and if you were to compare against a big sci-fi movie, there's probably an equivalent amount of CG production work AND TIME involved. Some big games now take large teams multiple years to create, refine, test.
So I'm writing a proposal about making a virtual world example of the "new campus" for a new building/etc as a demo, with the outer edges being the roads outside campus, and including parking spaces, walkways into the buildings, the exterior and interior of the buildings, and how to get everywhere inside. You'd be able to find offices, classrooms, the auditorium, restrooms, cafeteria/food-court, etc.
An interesting variant on this time is 3D PDF. If you have Acrobat Reader 7 or 8, click HERE to see an interesting example. This does not do the interactive drive-through I want, but it's a possible way to start from the 3D CAD model. Apparently there is a tool available that will take a SketchUp drawing and make a 3D PDF from it...which would be very interesting. Personally I don't like SketchUp, I was able to bend a rectangle into a pretzel in less than 60 seconds when I first test-drove it a year ago, so I threw it out immediately. But the general approach is the right concept.
With the right kind of fly/walk-through, the relocation from the current campus to new campus (which will involve the entire org) could be a much smoother episode.
And you could imagine adapting this process into teaching a variety of other things. And that new faculty and students are going to expect it as a standard approach...best to lead rather than follow, if the effort can be undertaken at reasonable cost.
All part of the "we need to teach differently" because "they learn differently"...which basically means that chalkboard and flipcharts need to go away, even if that means the teachers have to get replaced, too.
That said, there are undoubtedly things that continue to need to be learned face-to-face, but there are probably plenty of things that don't, and can have some automation work done.
One of the exciting things about Second Life is that you the user can create your own content, kinda like the web, and can use it immediately, and others can see it immediately. If this creation process is easy enough, more folks will do it.
I haven't figured out how that fits into the new campus idea, but suppose that Hyde U instructors could also have a presence in "their office" in the model, and you could voice-chat with them (or at least IM) through the VW? Would that encourage content creation? Do classes evolve from in-person to online? Do we reach the point where in fact the school ceases to have a physical existence at all, and only a virtual one? Could the same mission be achieved? That would certainly be interesting. If everyone is represented by an avatar as opposed to a real face, do you achieve the same teaching result? Do the avatars proxy for you adequately?
Phrase coined by me, on Nov 5, 2007.
This was a result of some discussion about using Virtual Worlds as training tools. It arose after an hour+ of discussion about VW-as-training, and someone saying a few things about how kids from little up to 22 or so have their brains getting wired differently because of early and continuous exposure to computers and electronic gadgets.
Virtual Worlds are implemented as something like a computer game, a la Oblivion (see other posts for thoughts on that game), or Second Life, which you can read about in the dead-tree newspapers.
I'm thinking this is a good idea, but it will of course not be trivial to implement such training. It will grow cheaper and more powerful over time, but at the moment, it ain't. Comparison: look at the credits list of names at the back of the Oblivion game book, and look at the credits list at the end of a mid-size Hollywood movie. Those lists are comparable in terms of number of people, and if you were to compare against a big sci-fi movie, there's probably an equivalent amount of CG production work AND TIME involved. Some big games now take large teams multiple years to create, refine, test.
So I'm writing a proposal about making a virtual world example of the "new campus" for a new building/etc as a demo, with the outer edges being the roads outside campus, and including parking spaces, walkways into the buildings, the exterior and interior of the buildings, and how to get everywhere inside. You'd be able to find offices, classrooms, the auditorium, restrooms, cafeteria/food-court, etc.
An interesting variant on this time is 3D PDF. If you have Acrobat Reader 7 or 8, click HERE to see an interesting example. This does not do the interactive drive-through I want, but it's a possible way to start from the 3D CAD model. Apparently there is a tool available that will take a SketchUp drawing and make a 3D PDF from it...which would be very interesting. Personally I don't like SketchUp, I was able to bend a rectangle into a pretzel in less than 60 seconds when I first test-drove it a year ago, so I threw it out immediately. But the general approach is the right concept.
With the right kind of fly/walk-through, the relocation from the current campus to new campus (which will involve the entire org) could be a much smoother episode.
And you could imagine adapting this process into teaching a variety of other things. And that new faculty and students are going to expect it as a standard approach...best to lead rather than follow, if the effort can be undertaken at reasonable cost.
All part of the "we need to teach differently" because "they learn differently"...which basically means that chalkboard and flipcharts need to go away, even if that means the teachers have to get replaced, too.
That said, there are undoubtedly things that continue to need to be learned face-to-face, but there are probably plenty of things that don't, and can have some automation work done.
One of the exciting things about Second Life is that you the user can create your own content, kinda like the web, and can use it immediately, and others can see it immediately. If this creation process is easy enough, more folks will do it.
I haven't figured out how that fits into the new campus idea, but suppose that Hyde U instructors could also have a presence in "their office" in the model, and you could voice-chat with them (or at least IM) through the VW? Would that encourage content creation? Do classes evolve from in-person to online? Do we reach the point where in fact the school ceases to have a physical existence at all, and only a virtual one? Could the same mission be achieved? That would certainly be interesting. If everyone is represented by an avatar as opposed to a real face, do you achieve the same teaching result? Do the avatars proxy for you adequately?
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Bioshock
d/l'd the demo...installer ran ok, it didn't complain about my machine...but I got zip for video--a large dark brown rectangle. I could hear something happening, but no visuals at all.
no indication of what was wrong. UT04 still runs just fine. I find myself wondering if I had hardware trouble after being on vac in late august. went away for a week, powered everything down...when I came back, the PC did NOT want to boot; boot disk didn't get recognized by the mobo, so it dropped that disk from the boot order (why would you do that? let ME control that), and then when it WAS recognized, would not boot. took me a while, incl reboots and looking at the BIOS settings, before I figured out that was what had happened. I had feared it was the new 1GB RAM stick (which had been a problem in the beginning, where the machine did not want to boot with anything other than a 256 in one slot and one of my 512s in the other). So I was fiddling with RAM, and trying to figure out the disks...gad. Eventually: back to normal, but no idea why there was a prob.
Twas after this I did the bioshock d/l, and saw that weirdness. so then I went to check out some other games. Dungeon Siege 1 played fine, but 2 did not (really weird stuff with colors, and showing a gazillion triangles wiggling around (in game motion, and sparklies).
curses! now I'm a little bit worried about the machine. (any worse, and I have to change it's name to the beaver).
no indication of what was wrong. UT04 still runs just fine. I find myself wondering if I had hardware trouble after being on vac in late august. went away for a week, powered everything down...when I came back, the PC did NOT want to boot; boot disk didn't get recognized by the mobo, so it dropped that disk from the boot order (why would you do that? let ME control that), and then when it WAS recognized, would not boot. took me a while, incl reboots and looking at the BIOS settings, before I figured out that was what had happened. I had feared it was the new 1GB RAM stick (which had been a problem in the beginning, where the machine did not want to boot with anything other than a 256 in one slot and one of my 512s in the other). So I was fiddling with RAM, and trying to figure out the disks...gad. Eventually: back to normal, but no idea why there was a prob.
Twas after this I did the bioshock d/l, and saw that weirdness. so then I went to check out some other games. Dungeon Siege 1 played fine, but 2 did not (really weird stuff with colors, and showing a gazillion triangles wiggling around (in game motion, and sparklies).
curses! now I'm a little bit worried about the machine. (any worse, and I have to change it's name to the beaver).
software dev...
I'm a programmer (hacker in the old-style definition)...over 30 years...have done a variety of things.
work by others that I like:
JCarousel -- this is a clone of Apple TV GUI. very pretty. Although it is perhaps the 3D icons that make it look so good. I'm interested in 3D GUI these days.
work by others that I like:
JCarousel -- this is a clone of Apple TV GUI. very pretty. Although it is perhaps the 3D icons that make it look so good. I'm interested in 3D GUI these days.
affiliations...
We are NOT affiliated with Hyde School, altho we do find the name connection intriguing. Unlike us, they don't produce Advanced Degrees.
We are likewise NOT related to hYdErOcK, although we like her looks...and some of the music, especially this one.
We are also NOT related to Hyde Yoga, although my wife's name is now Hyde, and she IS a yoga instructor.
We are likewise NOT related to hYdErOcK, although we like her looks...and some of the music, especially this one.
We are also NOT related to Hyde Yoga, although my wife's name is now Hyde, and she IS a yoga instructor.
favorite things...
there's only one thing I like more than reading...but I'm probably not writing about that here...primarily I read science fiction. Being an engineer and software jockey, that shouldn't be too surprising.
finally read all the titles by Charles Stross that I have (Timelike Dip, Accelerando, Glasshouse, OHMOS)...he's done more, but mostly short stories in the mags, and things under contract but not yet in print. See his FAQ for more info. a little bit of his writing is actually on his website.
Accelerando is absolutely amazing...wish I'd written it...the wild-n-crazy-idea density in this novel is almost off the scale, like nothing you've ever read. (it originated as a series of short stories) The funky ideas roll off (like the classic, oft-mentioned Heinlein "the door dilated", which was about the only time Heinlein tossed off something like that) at a pace you've never seen before. read the electronic version here.
All the stories I read have some inter-related flavor (incl use of certain phrases), they are all about "the singularity", a point in time (probably in the future, but perhaps the recent past, too) beyond which it is no longer possible to imagine what the future is going to be like, because the rate of change due to technological advances is so high that you are future-shocked continuously. Bring it on, I say--can't happen to soon.
Stross handles that all like it's a walk in the park. We are certainly approaching that time, I'd argue that it's this century, because we are basically progressing in terms of computing and biotech at an unbelievable speed, and the convergence of those two things is going to happen soon.
Timelike Diplomacy is only a little based on the singularity. Accelerando is ALL about it, OHMOS is differently based on it (mixing tech with the occult -- not hard to imagine, "sufficiently advanced tech = magic")
Stross has been a computer jockey, too...in the stories I read, he mentions two programming languages, one I consider scruffy in the extreme, the other my all-time favorite (and which I used to be *very* good with).
I haven't been this impressed with a new (at least to me) write since I discovered Peter Hamilton a few years ago.
finally read all the titles by Charles Stross that I have (Timelike Dip, Accelerando, Glasshouse, OHMOS)...he's done more, but mostly short stories in the mags, and things under contract but not yet in print. See his FAQ for more info. a little bit of his writing is actually on his website.
Accelerando is absolutely amazing...wish I'd written it...the wild-n-crazy-idea density in this novel is almost off the scale, like nothing you've ever read. (it originated as a series of short stories) The funky ideas roll off (like the classic, oft-mentioned Heinlein "the door dilated", which was about the only time Heinlein tossed off something like that) at a pace you've never seen before. read the electronic version here.
All the stories I read have some inter-related flavor (incl use of certain phrases), they are all about "the singularity", a point in time (probably in the future, but perhaps the recent past, too) beyond which it is no longer possible to imagine what the future is going to be like, because the rate of change due to technological advances is so high that you are future-shocked continuously. Bring it on, I say--can't happen to soon.
Stross handles that all like it's a walk in the park. We are certainly approaching that time, I'd argue that it's this century, because we are basically progressing in terms of computing and biotech at an unbelievable speed, and the convergence of those two things is going to happen soon.
Timelike Diplomacy is only a little based on the singularity. Accelerando is ALL about it, OHMOS is differently based on it (mixing tech with the occult -- not hard to imagine, "sufficiently advanced tech = magic")
Stross has been a computer jockey, too...in the stories I read, he mentions two programming languages, one I consider scruffy in the extreme, the other my all-time favorite (and which I used to be *very* good with).
I haven't been this impressed with a new (at least to me) write since I discovered Peter Hamilton a few years ago.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
new computer games
a few weeks ago I came across the place where I had installed the Supreme Commander demo but never run it...so I fired it up.
well, no I didn't. after thinking for a short while, it decided my computer isn't fast enough. huh? granted, it's not top of the line, but I have more than a few games that run quite well on it...I think it was unhappy about the clock rate.
I have an AMD 3800+ X64 dual core. I run XP x64. I have an ATI X1600 (all those X's, gotta love it). So why is that insufficient?
Today, I was at Best Buy (getting a 1GB mem upgrade stick, so now I have 1.5 GB). Also had a look at the Bioshock boxes. says it wants a 2.4 GHz Pentium...how does my cpu compare to that? what about other new games? am I going to be out of the market soon? this machine runs UT04 just fine, Oblivion and HL2 likewise.
well, no I didn't. after thinking for a short while, it decided my computer isn't fast enough. huh? granted, it's not top of the line, but I have more than a few games that run quite well on it...I think it was unhappy about the clock rate.
I have an AMD 3800+ X64 dual core. I run XP x64. I have an ATI X1600 (all those X's, gotta love it). So why is that insufficient?
Today, I was at Best Buy (getting a 1GB mem upgrade stick, so now I have 1.5 GB). Also had a look at the Bioshock boxes. says it wants a 2.4 GHz Pentium...how does my cpu compare to that? what about other new games? am I going to be out of the market soon? this machine runs UT04 just fine, Oblivion and HL2 likewise.
Friday, August 03, 2007
Computer upgrades
I generally build and upgrade my computers myself--that way I control what I have, and get improvements when I want them as opposed to when someone else thinks I should have them. My requirements are different from other folks...
So on my Macintosh G5 tower, I've got an extra internal disk, 4GB RAM. It's about time to replace disks in there, because 500 GB drives are now under $100. The mind boggles...I mean, that's an ENORMOUS amount of space. The machine came with a single 160 GB, and I added another 160. They're pretty much full at this point.
The only thing you can do that actually takes that kind of space is digital video. Even with all my digitized CDs and the free music downloads (see blog a few months ago on that), the MP3s only occupy about 100 GB...I started doing digitial video 2 yrs ago, pretty much only to do the DVR bit and slice-n-dice commercials out of TV, or burn a classic old movie to DVD. I'm not making YouTube stuff :)
Digital video takes about 2GB per hour to record, so if you are going to keep much of it, you are going to really need some serious space. What I have does not cut it. Swapping the 160s for 500s will solve that.
My Powerbook laptop only has 80GB to start with, and while that's kinda full (about 15 GB open), that's not what it's for, so I ain't worried about that.
My PC, which I built from components, has about 600GB, but I'm not doing DVR there OR much in the way of music...that's my games and primary programming machine, so 600GB is serious overkill.
Terabyte drives are available already, and soon that will be the default size for desktop machines. Almost absurd, really.
That kind of storage capacity exceeds what you can actually use in your lifetime, if you aren't doing DVR. Think of it this way: the typical document you generate is maybe a megabyte or so. If that takes you a week, you can make 50 a year. During your life you can make a few thousand. Suppose you save an interesting amount of music, 100GB or so. and maybe another 100GB of photos (you can take 1 MB pictures a lot faster than you can create text documents). In fact, it brings you to the point where deleting files is not something you need or want to do.
DOS, Windows and unix (OSX, Linux) -derived operating systems all began back when storage space was infinitesimal in comparison, so the conception was that you never kept extra/different copies of things. And storage was expensive. Nowadays, what different would it make? None, and it might even be to your benefit NOT to be deleting things.
I spent a number of years with a couple of computers whose file-system worked with version numbers as part of file-names, so every time you saved, you got a new version number of a file. After a while you'd have quite a few...which could get to be a problem (in the 70s, I worked on one where the OS (some horror from HP) had multiple versions, but it didn't warn you about running out of disk space until you did so, and as the machine didn't do multi-tasking, you had to quit the editor, losing changes, then go to the file-manager, delete things, and back to the editor to start again...THAT was really annoying, but I wasn't the person who got burned worst by it). But these days, it really wouldn't matter much, and if ALL your software did autosaves, you pretty much would never lose anything.
And indexing of your disk and its contents ought to be a built-in function in the OS. If that worked, you'd have an easier time of finding old docs without having to be as careful about organizing. I'm better at organizing than a lot of folks, and I can't always find things (what did I call that doc? where?) Mac OSX 10.4's "Spotlight" and the Google desktop are good starts at this. Windows is bad by itself, only indexing filenames, although that's better than nothing. (ok, apparently now that's not true, it does some indexing on the contents, but it doesn't do a very good job at all on the filenames--should create a database it can match against rather than re-reading every single directory)
I'd like to put a more advanced video card in the G5, but as I don't play games there too much, what I have (ATI 9600) is adequate. Wouldn't cut it for Doom 3, etc, but that's not what I do on that machine.
On my PC, however, I have an ATI X1600 video, an AMD dual-core cpu, 600GB disk, DVD burner...the one flaw is that I don't have enough RAM. Would like to upgrade, but not sure what to do. Apparently the motherboard wants dual-channel RAM, which I don't have...I have one 256 MB stick, and one 512 MB stick of single-channel. The socket the 256 stick is in won't take a 512, the machine won't even boot with a 512 single-channel in there. So do I need to replace with dual-channels? Do I replace the 512 with a 1GB? What? These are PC3200 (DDR 400) sticks, which are not as common as they used to be, and not as cheap as newer/faster, and I can't upgrade them for speed reasons (I think I can't upgrade the CPU any further for speed either).
[Later: I got a 1GB upgrade for the PC that finally actually worked--back in the beginning when I built the thing it would not take a 512 stick in either socket, now it does, no idea why. That was September. In Nov, I got another one, also works right, and now I am showing 2 GB of dual-channel RAM. didn't get special sticks, just generic, but the boot-time msg says dual-channel. hooray! Will I see a speed diff?]
I'm running Windows 64 on the PC, which has a few other problems--cannot put a WiFi in it, there seem to not be drivers for that for any WiFi I might try...complicated by the fact that I build this in a micro-case, so I have zero expansion inside beyond what I've done...so the WiFi test used an USB WiFi gizmo...which turned out to work fine on the old PC my son uses, other than not being all that fast (I seemed not to be able to force it to be "11g" speed, no idea why).
Well, it's an endless pursuit. Son's PC was my previous one, I built the latest 18 months ago, and will probably build a new one again in another couple of years. I expect the reason for that one will be I need a dual-cpu, dual-core, and a big speed increase for some reason. I don't expect to replace either the laptop or the G5 any time soon...both of them run software I've had quite a while, and the cost of upgrading to the Intel cpu versions of everything would exceed what I can afford.
So on my Macintosh G5 tower, I've got an extra internal disk, 4GB RAM. It's about time to replace disks in there, because 500 GB drives are now under $100. The mind boggles...I mean, that's an ENORMOUS amount of space. The machine came with a single 160 GB, and I added another 160. They're pretty much full at this point.
The only thing you can do that actually takes that kind of space is digital video. Even with all my digitized CDs and the free music downloads (see blog a few months ago on that), the MP3s only occupy about 100 GB...I started doing digitial video 2 yrs ago, pretty much only to do the DVR bit and slice-n-dice commercials out of TV, or burn a classic old movie to DVD. I'm not making YouTube stuff :)
Digital video takes about 2GB per hour to record, so if you are going to keep much of it, you are going to really need some serious space. What I have does not cut it. Swapping the 160s for 500s will solve that.
My Powerbook laptop only has 80GB to start with, and while that's kinda full (about 15 GB open), that's not what it's for, so I ain't worried about that.
My PC, which I built from components, has about 600GB, but I'm not doing DVR there OR much in the way of music...that's my games and primary programming machine, so 600GB is serious overkill.
Terabyte drives are available already, and soon that will be the default size for desktop machines. Almost absurd, really.
That kind of storage capacity exceeds what you can actually use in your lifetime, if you aren't doing DVR. Think of it this way: the typical document you generate is maybe a megabyte or so. If that takes you a week, you can make 50 a year. During your life you can make a few thousand. Suppose you save an interesting amount of music, 100GB or so. and maybe another 100GB of photos (you can take 1 MB pictures a lot faster than you can create text documents). In fact, it brings you to the point where deleting files is not something you need or want to do.
DOS, Windows and unix (OSX, Linux) -derived operating systems all began back when storage space was infinitesimal in comparison, so the conception was that you never kept extra/different copies of things. And storage was expensive. Nowadays, what different would it make? None, and it might even be to your benefit NOT to be deleting things.
I spent a number of years with a couple of computers whose file-system worked with version numbers as part of file-names, so every time you saved, you got a new version number of a file. After a while you'd have quite a few...which could get to be a problem (in the 70s, I worked on one where the OS (some horror from HP) had multiple versions, but it didn't warn you about running out of disk space until you did so, and as the machine didn't do multi-tasking, you had to quit the editor, losing changes, then go to the file-manager, delete things, and back to the editor to start again...THAT was really annoying, but I wasn't the person who got burned worst by it). But these days, it really wouldn't matter much, and if ALL your software did autosaves, you pretty much would never lose anything.
And indexing of your disk and its contents ought to be a built-in function in the OS. If that worked, you'd have an easier time of finding old docs without having to be as careful about organizing. I'm better at organizing than a lot of folks, and I can't always find things (what did I call that doc? where?) Mac OSX 10.4's "Spotlight" and the Google desktop are good starts at this. Windows is bad by itself, only indexing filenames, although that's better than nothing. (ok, apparently now that's not true, it does some indexing on the contents, but it doesn't do a very good job at all on the filenames--should create a database it can match against rather than re-reading every single directory)
I'd like to put a more advanced video card in the G5, but as I don't play games there too much, what I have (ATI 9600) is adequate. Wouldn't cut it for Doom 3, etc, but that's not what I do on that machine.
On my PC, however, I have an ATI X1600 video, an AMD dual-core cpu, 600GB disk, DVD burner...the one flaw is that I don't have enough RAM. Would like to upgrade, but not sure what to do. Apparently the motherboard wants dual-channel RAM, which I don't have...I have one 256 MB stick, and one 512 MB stick of single-channel. The socket the 256 stick is in won't take a 512, the machine won't even boot with a 512 single-channel in there. So do I need to replace with dual-channels? Do I replace the 512 with a 1GB? What? These are PC3200 (DDR 400) sticks, which are not as common as they used to be, and not as cheap as newer/faster, and I can't upgrade them for speed reasons (I think I can't upgrade the CPU any further for speed either).
[Later: I got a 1GB upgrade for the PC that finally actually worked--back in the beginning when I built the thing it would not take a 512 stick in either socket, now it does, no idea why. That was September. In Nov, I got another one, also works right, and now I am showing 2 GB of dual-channel RAM. didn't get special sticks, just generic, but the boot-time msg says dual-channel. hooray! Will I see a speed diff?]
I'm running Windows 64 on the PC, which has a few other problems--cannot put a WiFi in it, there seem to not be drivers for that for any WiFi I might try...complicated by the fact that I build this in a micro-case, so I have zero expansion inside beyond what I've done...so the WiFi test used an USB WiFi gizmo...which turned out to work fine on the old PC my son uses, other than not being all that fast (I seemed not to be able to force it to be "11g" speed, no idea why).
Well, it's an endless pursuit. Son's PC was my previous one, I built the latest 18 months ago, and will probably build a new one again in another couple of years. I expect the reason for that one will be I need a dual-cpu, dual-core, and a big speed increase for some reason. I don't expect to replace either the laptop or the G5 any time soon...both of them run software I've had quite a while, and the cost of upgrading to the Intel cpu versions of everything would exceed what I can afford.
Monday, July 30, 2007
good humor in the newspaper
I read the Washington Post here...a very good paper, and occasionally you get things that are really funny in an otherwise serious story.
The recent (late July 2007) flap about whether or not the Post should have published a story about whether or not Hillary Clinton should have worn a particular shirt/top with a particular jacket and thus exposed a little cleavage produced some really amusing results.
One of which was an editorial a few days later in which Ruth Marcus referred to herself as "a person of cleavage"!
Hilarious!
The recent (late July 2007) flap about whether or not the Post should have published a story about whether or not Hillary Clinton should have worn a particular shirt/top with a particular jacket and thus exposed a little cleavage produced some really amusing results.
One of which was an editorial a few days later in which Ruth Marcus referred to herself as "a person of cleavage"!
Hilarious!
Thursday, July 26, 2007
having finally played Doom 3...
it is, of course, beautiful...but it's also unrelentingly dark, the kind of dark where you KNOW things are going to jump out and scare you. From behind. Repeatedly.
Which gets tiresome after a while. I was about 3/4 of the way through when I got tired of it, and entered these two lines into the console:
bind f10 god
bind f11 give all
and then things were less annoying. Sarge, for example.
I did like the part where the fact that weapons, ammo, etc are just lying around everywhere--at least that makes sense in the game story. It would also probably help quite a bit if you had a real 5.1 sound system, with speakers placed in front and behind you, so you'd know when a creature spawned behind you (which happens pretty often), and which one it was--they seemed to have unique audio which you could recognize them with (for example, the guy with the shoulder-mounted rockets always seemed to be saying "big banana").
[update on July 30: forgot this earlier: here's the URL to a really nifty screen-snap of what happens when you shotgun one of the zombies up close and personal.
note right above the red circle in the middle there's a round thing with some lines both horiz and vert: that's a zombie brain popping out of the skull after you shoot it in the head with the shotgun at close range. That was classic! Hilarious!]
Questions: with all this mil gear around, how come I don't have night-vision goggles? and how come I can't hold the flashlight and the pistol at the same time?
I only paid $20 for it, got my money's worth, although I won't play it a second time...there are other games I like better, even after multiple plays on an invariant linear game. Like UT04, which I found 30+ maps for last month.
Update on July 29. I watched the DOOM movie again last night (saw it first 2-3 months ago, long before playing the game)...There's really not much connection between the two, which is kinda disappointing. I think if the movie had tightly followed the game, it would have been better...as it was, it seemed like a lot of other secret-genetic-lab-experiments-on-humans-gone-awry movies (wasn't Resident Evil much the same?), as opposed to monsters-from-a-portal-to-hell (and there weren't nearly enough of them--I mean, I musta blasted 3-4 *hundred* in the game). And what was that stuff about evacuating civilians? The Marines strike team spends time in a "sewer" ?! on Mars !? Well, most of the lights were broken in the movie, too--and they did NOT have night-vision goggles. Nor did they find ammo-n-weapons lying around everywhere, etc. Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike the movie, but it pales next to the game.
Update on July 29. I watched the DOOM movie again last night (saw it first 2-3 months ago, long before playing the game)...There's really not much connection between the two, which is kinda disappointing. I think if the movie had tightly followed the game, it would have been better...as it was, it seemed like a lot of other secret-genetic-lab-experiments-on-humans-gone-awry movies (wasn't Resident Evil much the same?), as opposed to monsters-from-a-portal-to-hell (and there weren't nearly enough of them--I mean, I musta blasted 3-4 *hundred* in the game). And what was that stuff about evacuating civilians? The Marines strike team spends time in a "sewer" ?! on Mars !? Well, most of the lights were broken in the movie, too--and they did NOT have night-vision goggles. Nor did they find ammo-n-weapons lying around everywhere, etc. Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike the movie, but it pales next to the game.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Played Half-life 2 recently...
It pretty much lives up to its billing in every way. Except the lack of warning about the linearity. Very nearly no deviation off the main line. No Advanced Degree (tm) needed for this game.
The gravity gun is pretty nifty. Unfortunately, you can't use it to grab and throw opponents until late in the game, which bites. What you CAN do that's interesting is use a 50-gal drum as a shield with the grav gun. The opponents are too stupid to realize what you're doing, and since they can't see you, they don't shoot. Mostly--eventually some of them smarten up and shoot the can out of your grip. You can use it to grab those flying attack-bots and fling them into a wall--that's nice. and slicing zombies with saw-blades--that is way cool.
There are more weapons that you find than you actually need. I didn't find the six-shooter particularly helpful. The shotgun was excellent, the machine gun ok, the rocket launcher is required for some things (incl ones you didn't expect). (actually, the six-shooter is good for those barnacle-things on various ceilings)
The biz about shooting helicopters: we lost a lot of choppers and fighter jets in Vietnam from casual machine-gun fire (give all the villagers machine guns and plenty of ammo, tell them when they hear a chopper or jet to run outside with the gun and just shoot up in the air--you'll end up shredding the flyers eventually, at very low cost). I should be able to bring down those helicopters gunships with any automatic weapon in addition to the rocket launcher. (Did you notice how much those flying things look like bugs?)
There's one spot late in the game where you have four snipers. The first two of them you can really just run past, so you should do so. The reason for this is that you may have a load of rockets (well, 3), and since you can use them to take out the snipers, you might be tempted. However: those first two aren't actually that dangerous. It's the second two snipers that are a problem, and you almost certainly have to have the rockets for them. Online walk-throughs say you can throw hand-grenades at the second two snipers--I absolutely could NOT do that, I got killed quick every time. You CAN hit them with the rockets--the trick is to realize that you can't really show yourself but just barely to where you can see the windows they're inside, and then remember how the rocket launcher works, because there isn't extra ammo around. If you stand up to where those two snipers can see you, you'll be dead quick. But if you crouch to where you can just barely see the top of the window, they can't see you yet, and you can rocket them both.
This game didn't really take me all that long to play, maybe two weeks of serious play time, during which my wife felt neglected :( Definitely worth the $20 I spent; at the moment, I'm not expecting to do any of the expansions. The gravity gun, however...need to see that elsewhere.
August: I went back and played again, after recovering my Steam login. Then I fired up the cheats opportunity, and the played the entire game (after about 3 levels), with the super gravity gun. game was MUCH more fun with that, and realizing that you can grab thrown hand-grenades mid-air and throw them back, in addition to being able to grab virtually any opponent...with one exception. I was not able to grab the ant-lion queens, reason not known, but since if you look at other parameters you can modify in the console, it's all heavy on the physics, they are probably weight-related.
The gravity gun is pretty nifty. Unfortunately, you can't use it to grab and throw opponents until late in the game, which bites. What you CAN do that's interesting is use a 50-gal drum as a shield with the grav gun. The opponents are too stupid to realize what you're doing, and since they can't see you, they don't shoot. Mostly--eventually some of them smarten up and shoot the can out of your grip. You can use it to grab those flying attack-bots and fling them into a wall--that's nice. and slicing zombies with saw-blades--that is way cool.
There are more weapons that you find than you actually need. I didn't find the six-shooter particularly helpful. The shotgun was excellent, the machine gun ok, the rocket launcher is required for some things (incl ones you didn't expect). (actually, the six-shooter is good for those barnacle-things on various ceilings)
The biz about shooting helicopters: we lost a lot of choppers and fighter jets in Vietnam from casual machine-gun fire (give all the villagers machine guns and plenty of ammo, tell them when they hear a chopper or jet to run outside with the gun and just shoot up in the air--you'll end up shredding the flyers eventually, at very low cost). I should be able to bring down those helicopters gunships with any automatic weapon in addition to the rocket launcher. (Did you notice how much those flying things look like bugs?)
There's one spot late in the game where you have four snipers. The first two of them you can really just run past, so you should do so. The reason for this is that you may have a load of rockets (well, 3), and since you can use them to take out the snipers, you might be tempted. However: those first two aren't actually that dangerous. It's the second two snipers that are a problem, and you almost certainly have to have the rockets for them. Online walk-throughs say you can throw hand-grenades at the second two snipers--I absolutely could NOT do that, I got killed quick every time. You CAN hit them with the rockets--the trick is to realize that you can't really show yourself but just barely to where you can see the windows they're inside, and then remember how the rocket launcher works, because there isn't extra ammo around. If you stand up to where those two snipers can see you, you'll be dead quick. But if you crouch to where you can just barely see the top of the window, they can't see you yet, and you can rocket them both.
This game didn't really take me all that long to play, maybe two weeks of serious play time, during which my wife felt neglected :( Definitely worth the $20 I spent; at the moment, I'm not expecting to do any of the expansions. The gravity gun, however...need to see that elsewhere.
August: I went back and played again, after recovering my Steam login. Then I fired up the cheats opportunity, and the played the entire game (after about 3 levels), with the super gravity gun. game was MUCH more fun with that, and realizing that you can grab thrown hand-grenades mid-air and throw them back, in addition to being able to grab virtually any opponent...with one exception. I was not able to grab the ant-lion queens, reason not known, but since if you look at other parameters you can modify in the console, it's all heavy on the physics, they are probably weight-related.
Free online music
Interested in free music? It shouldn't take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure out how to get good stuff without breaking the law. I want stuff to put on my iPod, to listen on the subway.
It really bugs me that there's so much reported tendency for music or movie piracy. Napster, etc. Of course this occurs because the market is being violated.
For comparison: you want the new CD by [whomever], it's $15, because people are used to paying that kind of price, from 20 years ago when the actual production cost was higher. Now...that production cost is near zero. 20 years ago LPs didn't cost nearly that much, even though the same monopolies existed. But it's still high, because there's no competition.
Example: if you want to buy a CD of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, you can get that for less than $5. Why the diff? Because the 5th is long out of copyright and into the public domain. Anyone can perform and record it. Many do, so there's actual competition, which keeps the cost low. Market forces at work.
So where the cost is high, it's because market violations (sanctioned monopoly) exist.
Don't want to pay that much? Find something else, don't pirate that one. Plenty of alternatives. Vote with your wallet.
Well, where should you look? MP3.com used to be a good place, until someone thought there was money to be made there, bought it, shut it down, and later re-opened with a lot of old stuff gone and prices that I thought weren't competitive.
My favorites are:
http://www.Besonic.com/, a German website, reborn a year or two ago, a year and some after a disastrous disk crash that wiped out eveything and their backups. Besonic has somewhat more traditional grouping/organization. I discovered this website by accident a few years ago, enough before the disaster that I was able to grab an interesting amount of stuff. Most of which was really weak on the ID3 tags, so I have a bunch of tunes with no info...and following their disk crash, no way for me to find out. You have to register to do downloads, but you don't get a big load of spam as a result, just the occasional email mentioning new things.
http://www.jamendo.com/, a Polish website (or maybe it's French), not nearly as much content, but some very nice stuff. Jamendo uses tag clouds as the grouping mechanism, it's weird getting used to. Downloads are via BitTorrent, no registration required. I'm listening to this stuff a lot right now, lots of nice work there. There's a lot of French stuff on here, but they aren't any better at rap than anyone else, which is to say, lau-zee.
Then do the right thing and send the artist some money, if you keep the stuff and listen to it. Nothing encourages the struggling artist like getting some cash :)
Both are highly recommended.
Update on Aug 3, 2007.
http://www.soundclick.com/ is also an excellent source. I had forgotten about this one...
Update on Oct 17, 2007.
found out about another one: Wolfgang's Vault, apparently this has many/most/all of Bill Graham's archive of recorded shows at the Fillmores, etc. OMG! You have got to check this out. There are some AMAZING shows on there: Genesis, Allman Bros, Derek & Dominos, Pink Floyd...most are only available for listening, but if you can rip an audio stream...
It really bugs me that there's so much reported tendency for music or movie piracy. Napster, etc. Of course this occurs because the market is being violated.
For comparison: you want the new CD by [whomever], it's $15, because people are used to paying that kind of price, from 20 years ago when the actual production cost was higher. Now...that production cost is near zero. 20 years ago LPs didn't cost nearly that much, even though the same monopolies existed. But it's still high, because there's no competition.
Example: if you want to buy a CD of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, you can get that for less than $5. Why the diff? Because the 5th is long out of copyright and into the public domain. Anyone can perform and record it. Many do, so there's actual competition, which keeps the cost low. Market forces at work.
So where the cost is high, it's because market violations (sanctioned monopoly) exist.
Don't want to pay that much? Find something else, don't pirate that one. Plenty of alternatives. Vote with your wallet.
Well, where should you look? MP3.com used to be a good place, until someone thought there was money to be made there, bought it, shut it down, and later re-opened with a lot of old stuff gone and prices that I thought weren't competitive.
My favorites are:
http://www.Besonic.com/, a German website, reborn a year or two ago, a year and some after a disastrous disk crash that wiped out eveything and their backups. Besonic has somewhat more traditional grouping/organization. I discovered this website by accident a few years ago, enough before the disaster that I was able to grab an interesting amount of stuff. Most of which was really weak on the ID3 tags, so I have a bunch of tunes with no info...and following their disk crash, no way for me to find out. You have to register to do downloads, but you don't get a big load of spam as a result, just the occasional email mentioning new things.
http://www.jamendo.com/, a Polish website (or maybe it's French), not nearly as much content, but some very nice stuff. Jamendo uses tag clouds as the grouping mechanism, it's weird getting used to. Downloads are via BitTorrent, no registration required. I'm listening to this stuff a lot right now, lots of nice work there. There's a lot of French stuff on here, but they aren't any better at rap than anyone else, which is to say, lau-zee.
Then do the right thing and send the artist some money, if you keep the stuff and listen to it. Nothing encourages the struggling artist like getting some cash :)
Both are highly recommended.
Update on Aug 3, 2007.
http://www.soundclick.com/ is also an excellent source. I had forgotten about this one...
Update on Oct 17, 2007.
found out about another one: Wolfgang's Vault, apparently this has many/most/all of Bill Graham's archive of recorded shows at the Fillmores, etc. OMG! You have got to check this out. There are some AMAZING shows on there: Genesis, Allman Bros, Derek & Dominos, Pink Floyd...most are only available for listening, but if you can rip an audio stream...
Monday, January 22, 2007
Political Thoughts
I live just outside Washington DC, so there's a daily load of politics inundating you.
I used to think that "gridlock" in Congress was a bad thing, but after 12 years of Republican control, I now believe that one party should not have control of both halves of Congress AND the Presidency. Gridlock is not so bad.
I generally vote anti-incumbent. Throw the bums out! Term limits are good--no one should have that job for too long, it's clear that most congress[wo]men are out of touch.
You gotta wonder: since the 06 election, where control of Congress flipped parties on both sides, Republicans have begun to abandon Bush's policies on Iraq...would that have happened if control had not flipped? What would have been different on the ground in Baghdad? Anything?
Why is it so difficult for politicians to say things like this: You are going to have to work past age 65--do not count on that being instant retirement age, that was never the original intention. Don't expect Social Security to completely fund your retirement, it can't.
----
Something else: I find myself wondering when Cheney is going to say something about our "precious bodily fluids".
I used to think that "gridlock" in Congress was a bad thing, but after 12 years of Republican control, I now believe that one party should not have control of both halves of Congress AND the Presidency. Gridlock is not so bad.
I generally vote anti-incumbent. Throw the bums out! Term limits are good--no one should have that job for too long, it's clear that most congress[wo]men are out of touch.
You gotta wonder: since the 06 election, where control of Congress flipped parties on both sides, Republicans have begun to abandon Bush's policies on Iraq...would that have happened if control had not flipped? What would have been different on the ground in Baghdad? Anything?
Why is it so difficult for politicians to say things like this: You are going to have to work past age 65--do not count on that being instant retirement age, that was never the original intention. Don't expect Social Security to completely fund your retirement, it can't.
----
Something else: I find myself wondering when Cheney is going to say something about our "precious bodily fluids".
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