Hardware, firmware and software

I just saw this on Lifehacker, and I think the idea is pretty novel and makes perfect sense.

Rockbox is an operating system (firmware) that can be installed on a variety of mp3 players including older generations of iPods. What is particularly great about Rockbox is that the interface looks DOPPPPE. Peep the shots swiped from Lifehacker:

Also, for all you computer nerds, Rockbox also comes with games, including Sudoku and DOOM. Yes, I said DOOM. Peep game:

For people with aging mp3 players that are still functional but no longer in use, why not spruce it up a bit and install Rockbox? That leads me to my only complaint about Rockbox–the limited number of supported devices. Here’s the list. If they could expand the list to include others, I think Rockbox is really onto something, which is the separation of firmware and hardware. This is somewhat important since most people still buy hardware because they are happy with how the software or firmware works or looks (they usually go hand in hand). Mac users, for example, will always have the justified claim that Mac OS’s and overall design is just that much better than Windows. On this count, they are right. But what if you could buy a laptop or mp3 player just for its aesthetic purposes and the reliability of its hardware and could install your own firm or software? Wouldn’t that allow for an actual explosion of design and customizability (on the hardware side) instead of the limited color palette that Apple, Dell and Asus work with? I’ve already seen hacks of PC’s with Mac OS’s installed on them. Then, Friedrich Kittler’s dictum–”There is nothing but hardware”–would be absolutely plausible.

Oh yeah speaking of business, the economy is continuing its self-merkage.

X-posted at Human Potential.

I don’t want the songs, give me the a capella

Couple of days ago Kanye released the stems of his new song “Love Lockdown” as premiered a couple of weeks ago on the VMAs (which were waaaaaaaaaaaaaack. I mean, do people not understand that award shows need a makeover? I didn’t watch the Emmy’s but everyone on the Internet has been saying it was a horrendous. But back to the VMAs, no one has cared about them in a decade!) Stems, if you don’t know, are the elements of the song on separate audio tracks–vocals, ad libs, various instrument parts, etc. For some hip hop heads, this seemed like some kind of revelatory act, one which the master of indeterminacy Mr. West himself geniusly concocted in his studio in Hawaii. But that’s in reality not true. Prior to Kanye’s proverbial open call to remix his song, Radiohead did exactly the same thing for their song “Reckoner.” Unlike Kanye, however, they are actually holding a contest to see whose remix gets voted the most popular (I’m not sure what the “prize” is but that’s pretty dope since producers on the level of Flying Lotus whose new album “Los Angeles” I love and Diplo whose new mixtape with Santogold is that fire are just two of the many contestants).

But this post is not so much about who did what first but more so about the changing nature of file-sharing in today’s music culture. For the past decade or so, we have thought that file-sharing meant illegal downloading on BitTorrent and other methods of various pre-formed “products” such as music and software. But I would argue that that is going to change as evidenced by the move that Radiohead and Kanye have already made. We will now demand not only “songs” but parts of songs or “stems” in order to remix them ourselves.

Some will clearly respond by saying: “This is terrible. As if the Internet wasn’t filled with terrible stuff already, now we are going to have 135322623623 horrible remixes.” To that I say: “Don’t listen to it then.” Now, I understand there are many out there who think this trend is going to parallel the fate of the party DJ after the wide adoption of the DJing software Serato Scratch, which allows for DJs to spin on digitally time-coded records their own mp3s from their laptops. Of course, professional DJs are upset and have developed their own language of disdain to refer to the explosion of DJs on the market–”microwave DJs.” LOL. It’s pretty funny. But nevertheless, I think this is a dangerously culturally conservative position that smuggles in a certain Victorian austerity of “authenticity,” which is precisely the opposite of the spirit of hip hop–the first music I ever got into(still my favorite). In the 1980s, we saw a slew of legislation against hip hop acts for sampling (De La Soul and Biz Markie were the first ones to get hit hard). These bands, such as the Turtles, who De La sampled, would make arguments along the lines of: “What they do isn’t original. They stole our music, our property.” Well, anyone who’s listened to De La or any sample-based music (not just hip hop) knows, it’s not exactly just stealing someone else’s ish and passing it off as your own. Anyone who has made a beat (or attempted) knows this.

Now with the permeation of the idea of “open source” all over the place, many cultural critics have responded with utter disgust. Andrew Keen is one of these people; he is author the book Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture. My fear is that peole who consider themselves to be hip hop heads will also become what I think of as “techno-cultural conservatives” like Keen. Those who believe there’s some “authentic” creativity that stands above “mass” creativity. This is an argument that the Frankfurt scholars Adorno and Horkheimer made about culture in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. (They thought it dumbed people down and thus took away their ability for critical reason. It may be true but they were widely attacked for not only their elitism but their refusal to rethink their belief in so-called human reason.)

But that’s all besides the point. I think this is a significant shift in how we view the base-level quanta of hip hop or music. Is it still “the song” or now something below that, something infra-song, like bits?

X-posted at Human Potential.

Brace yourselves for the bailout plan

UPDATE: The NY Times reports that a bailout which was in the works yesterday afternoon is caput. Word is that conservative House (Congressional) Republicans that are blocking the plan, wanting to repeal some of the more “socialistic” parts of the bailout. They have been calling it “financial socialism,” which I see really nothing that terrifying about. But hey, we live in America. I’m not happy about more deregulation action of the House Republicans but I am happy about someone yelling out “HOLD THE F*CK UP!” (not to be confused with Onyx’s classic album “Bacdafucup”). Thank God.

I haven’t really been blogging about the so-called “financial crisis” because I think the way that it has been handled by politicians, the Bush Administration and also the media is more than a bit simplified. Now just a word on simplifying things. Why do politicians and some pundits assume that the American people are stupid? And on the flip side, why are Americans kind of on a gut-level horribly anti-intellectual? What we thus get is oversimplified reporting and an American readership which contributes to its own mediocrity by somehow not liking it when things get complicated. Well, now that we are in the middle of a “financial meltdown,” in which words like “derivatives” and “securities” are thrown about, people, including some prominent media pundits, are utterly confused!

The most prominent rendition of how this whole meltdown happened has to do with the faceplant that housing prices did in the US. What happened during the whole housing boom which has given us so many freakin’ house-flipping shows such as the two on Bravo, one on TLC and others, made it so that many many many people started to buy houses with mortgage plans that were quite different than the “traditional” mortgage. Instead of putting the traditional 10-20% of the value of the house down, people were getting, the now infamous, “subprime” rates. That is, they were buying houses with $0 down, with their interest rates having to be renegotiated in 3-4 years. Next thing you know, with interest rates shooting up out of the affordability of many of these homeowners during their renegotiation, people could not pay their mortgages and thus had their houses foreclosed on. And then you have all of this, what is now called, “bad” debt, which firms such as Lehman and others have packaged into various “derivatives.” So when people stop paying their mortgages (I guess a debt that is considered “good”), the thing trickles UP.

Now this is the accepted story of how it went down, but I’m not sure if I agree with it all word for word. I would have an easier time doing so if it weren’t for the fact that now various folks are BLAMING the people who cannot afford their mortgage payments. It makes it as if had the poor people who were attempting to fulfill the propagandized American dream of owning a home with subprime lending (and of course the push of the quasi-governmental mortgage houses Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) are at the root of the problem. This is not true once you actually calibrate the scope of the problem properly. This would require looking back to the end of the dot-com boom, after which there was a lot of capital that was ready to be invested somewhere. This “somwhere” became real estate. Everyone from politicians to TV financial personalities doled out bits and pieces of the real estate hype, by which many many people thought that investing in their homes was not only a sure bet, but potentially even a cash cow. But as all bubbles do, this one burst and it boy did it all over the faces of the Wall Street guys, Ben Bernanke (Fed Chair) and Hank Paulson (Treasury Secretary). But do they not remember, the suits still have homes whereas we have over 1.5 million people in foreclosure across the country? And with the President of the United States talking about potential economic “panic,” are we then supposed to hurry up and wait by approving a plan that is analogous to the Patriot Act?

The NY Times says that the bailout plan is imminent (the outline is agreed upon by House and Senate members of the appropriate committees).

I’m not sure if I want to even know what the details are…

X-posted at Human Potential.

Google was on their grind yesterday

Okay, you all may know that I have a general disdain for Google because of its self-righteous corporatism, which I’ve blogged about here and here. Now, this is not to say that I don’t use Google or its various products. I do for several reasons, the chief being that they are actually very useful and good. Nevertheless, I don’t have to like it. (LOL. I know I’m being more than a tad hyprocritical).

But yesterday’s news about the Google Phone (G1) on T-Mobile overshadowed another Google project which they unveiled called Google Transit in partnership with the City of New York. Here’s a bit from the New York Times reportage of it:

The tool — which encompasses the M.T.A.’s subways, buses and two commuter railroads, along with the PATH and New Jersey Transit commuter lines — appears far more sophisticated than existing online trip planners like Trips123, a site that was built with public financing.

It also seems to offer a key distinction from other, prior services: Users do not need to search specifically for transit information. Instead, they are shown transit routes, stations and stops even if are merely searching for, say, a bagel store.

In other words, Google Transit is much like other services such as HopStop, but with City approval and Google-ness. And of course, this will be able to be used on the G1, another point through which Google can claim its “openness” (read: their anti-iPhone-ness). As Saul Hansell wrote in his coverage of the unveiling of the G1 yesterday

Executives of Google, HTC and T-Mobile, the first carrier to introduce the phone, used the word “open” more often than a gaggle of pediatric dentists.

LOL. Whenever someone emphasizes a word too much, you know there’s a reason…

The G1 is certainly not totally open. On some phones, like BlackBerries and Palm Treos, people simply can install applications right on the phone without asking anyone. For Android phones, all applications must be installed through an application store run by Google. Still, the process is simply meant to prevent malicious applications, he said.

“Our ground rules are very simple,” he [Sergey Brin, head honcho at Google] said. “The application developer has to verify they are who they are. They have to certify the application does what it does. And they have to inform the user what the application does.”

In other words, “open” as in not really open.

Add “open” to the list of empty signifiers…

But on a last substantive point (as opposed to the snipey comments that have constituted this blog post thus far), this is again another reason to think that PC-Web is really on its way out and mobile-Web is going to take the game over. For those of you like me who have a BlackBerry, using the Internet is definitely more than a little wack. And as more people have devices that allow for a better web browsing on their mobile devices, we will see a shift from how the Internet works right now to something far more involved in the naturo-physical world. In other words, we won’t print out directions from Google Maps but simply look it up on our smartphones to track our progress along the route through GPS.

Welcome to Web 3.0 (again).

X-posted at Human Potential.

I’m on Human Potential

What it is peoples! Just letting you all know on that I just got incorporated in a pretty cool meta-blog site called Human Potential. Here’s there “ABOUT” section:

Human Potential is a rapidly growing network of artists, musicians, and fashionistas. Unlike other online zine communities, HP aims to host events and fundraisers strictly for charitable causes. What started out as a clothing brand has now developed into a conglomerate of photographers, artists, musicians, designers, film directors, actors, and stylists.Together, HP hopes to introduce refreshing and original ideas to the fore of popular culture.

There are a crapload of bloggers on there and they are all into some pretty cool stuff. You should not only check them out but also peep me on my blog on their site as well. (Sorry for the self-promotion but I mean this is a blog. There’s always self-promotion). Shout out to El Gambina who is an editor there for hooking it up. (By the way, she’s an emcee.)

I’ll start x-posting future posts.

Rookie beats old guy

No, I’m not talking about Obama and McCain, although it could be applied to that. I’m talking about my favorite on-air news person/pundit Rachel Maddow, whose new show “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC beat Larry King (the aforementioned “old guy”) last week for the 9PM slot. She came in second last week to Hannity at Fox News but he got a boost from having the second Sarah Palin interview. We’ll see what the real numbers are at the end of this week. I bet Fox is salty.

I’ve blogged about her here on this and this occasion.

Biggups to the Huffington Post, from whom I swiped.

G1 – Google Phone

Update: Here are some early reviews from the Times Bits Blog.

They released it! (Just the photos and specs.) It looks pretty good, although I’m not the biggest HTC (the manufacturer) fan. It’s on T-Mobile (not a big fan of them either) and available for $179 starting on October 22 here in the States.

Read a bit more about it at the NY Times.

Will it compete wit the iPhone? It will but I’m not sure how well. It’s funny (and irritating) how Google tries to say that it’s a some kind of more politically left alternative to the iPhone since Android (the operating system on the phone which it made) encourages third party application makers to get it on it without approval from them. Apple’s iPhone also has third party apps but the process to get “approved” by Apple is something crazy according to the buzz on the Interweb. But let’s get it clear: it’s made by a CORPORATION, not some kid in a garage who wants to “do no evil” as Google describes itself.

What this all really kind of emphasizes is the fact that PC-web (the Internet accessed from personal computers) is a thing of the past. The new market is mobile-web (the Internet accessed from personal devices like smartphones and iPods). I guess that’ll be Web 3.0.

We were just getting used to the whole 2.0 thing…

More trickle from the “Is Google Making us Stupid?” faucet

The special comment “Ping” in the Technology section of the NY Times has weighed in–albeit a bit late–on the Atlantic “Google article,” which I blogged about here. Damon Darlin, the author, has employed a pretty funny device of summarizing the entire Atlantic article in Twitter form:

Google makes deep reading impossible. Media changes. Our brains’ wiring changes too. Computers think for us, flattening our intelligence.

If you managed to wade through that, maybe you are thinking that Twitter, not Google, is the enemy of human intellectual progress.

LOL.

Darlin continues in his comment to discuss Twitter as a stand in for Google, which as I discussed previously on this blog, stands in for technology in general for most journalists who cover technology. To his credit, Darlin agrees with me and thus explores why it is that so many people have such violent reactions towards technology:

If people question the benefit of Google, which has largely liberated us from the time-wasting activities associated with finding information, there is outright hostility to a tool that condenses our lives into haiku. The co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was asked by M.I.T.’s Technology Review magazine — in a tweet, of course — why when people who aren’t familiar with Twitter are told about it, they are “uncomprehending or angry.” His response was brief and unsatisfying: “People have to discover value for themselves. Especially w/ something as simple & subtle as Twitter. It’s what you make of it.”

As Carr, the author of the Atlantic article, and Darlin both rightly note, everyone always gets scared of new technology. Take, for example, the electronic calculator:

But the HP-35 hardly stultified engineering skills. Instead, in the last 36 years those engineers have brought us iPods, cellphones, high-definition TV and, yes, Google and Twitter. It freed engineers from wasting time on mundane tasks so they could spend more time creating.

Many technological advances have that effect. Take tax software, for instance. The tedious job of filing a tax return no longer requires several evenings, but just a few hours. It gives us time for more productive activities.

I hate it when you read something that you think you like and you get to the end and it’s really not something you could get down with. For me, Darlin’s full-throated pronouncement that technology helps humans more productive is not simply naive; but it is too simple of a view. Look at the closing sentences of his piece:

Certainly there have been moments when that thinking has gone horribly awry — atonal music or molecular gastronomy. But over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.

What really grates against my conscience is something that is not only found in Darlin’s piece but in a lot of media criticism, which in spite of the superficial LOVE of technology in all of it, does not give technology its due. As Darlin’s words above show, he thinks technology is somehow the slave of its human masters. That is what they used to say about Nature too…

Ever hear of oil?

Web 2.0 kills online pornography

It’s true, according to Bill Tancer, author of the new book Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters. Here’s a bit of the report from Yahoo! News:

Tancer, in his new book, “Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters,” said analyzing web searches did not just reflect what was happening online but gave a wider picture of society and people’s behavior.

…

Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.

He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.

“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,” said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.

“My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites.”

Wait, no time to look at porn sites? I find this to be not only totally unconvincing but especially so because of the time argument that Tancer seems to be making. I haven’t picked up his book (I don’t think I will) but I have a strange premonition that his understanding of how people browse the Web needs another look. Specifically, with the advent of tabbed-browsing there is really no good way to figure out which sites individual users are looking at in any given moment. For example, as I am writing this post, I have three tabs open on Firefox. What kind of mechanism is Tancer using to determine which one I’m actually on. What differentiates my typing on the New Post interface of WordPress from my open tab for the Wikipedia entry for “tabbed browsing” which I needed in order to hyperlink that term just in case some folks here didn’t know what that was?

This admittedly finnicky question has larger significance especially the spatio-temporal concepts such as “location” and “duration” are kind of almost impossible to think about in purely naturo-physical terms. That is to say, it is quite difficult to figure out “where” the user is during any given moment of web browsing. What if I have a page open and I’m not even paying attention to it? How does Tancer take into account such a phenomenon, which I’m sure everyone who browses the web can relate to? The difficulties of the questions that I have brought up, it seems to me, point to the rather inefficacy and unimportance of various facts released by Web-browsing researchers that are based on how much time people spend online doing x activity. Its rather oversimplified methodology seems to be reducing human activity to mechanistic one-task-at-a-time dronism.

This is what happens when statisticians try to do media theory…

The results are almost as bad as when journalists attempt philosophy.

Visualizing the Mash Up

The DJ Girl Talk has been recently profiled by the New York Times for pending lawsuits regarding his most recent album “Feed the Animals,” which consists of songs using short clips from various songs (mostly in the hip hop/pop/rock catalogs). It’s rather curious since the “sampling wars” happened in the late 1980s, but they are not revisited with Girl Talk’s music for reasons seemingly different than the immense litigation wrought by old bands like the Turtles who were suing for copyright violation. Now this is all old news so I won’t go into it but I did spot something pretty cool from Wired Magazine’s website. It is a visual rendering of the various samples used in a single Girl Talk song. Pretty dope.

What I find to be interesting is not so much Girl Talk’s recent new found legislative popularity but the image above. It is quite a radical difference looking at something like that as opposed to standard music notation aka sheet music. Now one major difference between sheet music and Wired’s transposition of Girl Talk’s “What’s It’s All About” is how you read it. Though “What It’s All About,” like most music is composed in a linear fashion, in linear time, Wired chose to render it in a circle of layers.

Not only is it quite brillian but I think also indicative of the state of musical visualiziation. What happens when music itself in all of its complexity–from how it is conceived of, composed, produced, reproduced, and thus distributed–changes radically through new technologies? I think, as this Wired image suggests, music’s visual representation must be upturned as well. I would venture to guess that this has somewhat always been the case in the history of the visual representation of music. Technologies have always codetermined how that process works. Sheet music, for example, is a piano-centric musical language since the piano (a percusso-melodic technology) was seen as the privileged compositional instrument during the classical era in Europe. In other words, if you were a composer, you composed on piano. And of course, there are several reasons for this, the most important being that the piano is polyphonic, meaning you can play more than one tone at a time. It’s difficult to do that on a cello or saxophone for example(though it’s not impossible. Listen to Coltrane if you want some evidence of this–it’s called playing “overtones”). The instrument (a technology that has congealed into a singular culturally and historically specified function) has always determined the regime of the visual representation of music.

The question today and the future is:what is the “instrument” of digital music? In Girl Talk’s case, it’s the laptop, which defies the defintition of “instrument” that I gave just above. It is, in effect, a meta-instrument–an instrument that can be any other instrument. Does this mean our children will not have to suffer the cruel torture of quarter-notes and half-notes? Yes, but it is to be replaced with the just as complicated language of 0s and 1s.