So… I decided I would, because it would be interesting.

I’m going to make the schemetic open sourced and available here. Expect more here soon.

Sam

I’m rather in the dark about how many of you (readers) there are, as there doesn’t seem to be any decent statistic tools out there that only count RSS reader updates. But how can there be?

This rather sucks, as the blog received 10,000 hits this month, but who knows where from? And how many of those are returning? How many of those are me?? That’s abit easier to work out, but you get my drift.

If I find the answer to by little problem, I’ll report back here

Sam

Title says it all really.

There was a fairly big crowd outside the council buildings in birmingham, so I went to ask what was going on. I was told by someone carrying a copy of the ‘morning star’ (the uk communist newspaper) that they had just had a council meeting about unions. The content of the meeting was unimportant. The simple fact there was a large gathering of communist supporters for such an event is potentially, a ‘sign of the’ new ‘times’.

One of the first of many for the communists in Britain? Are we going to see an uprising? Time will tell…

Sam

As time goes by, I get more and more agitated by the state of politics in general, but more specifically the state of politics in computer science.

It would appear to me, that as Gordon Brown continues to meddle with the economy (in a positive way) and David Cameron continues to slag him off for it, Britain needs a party of change. Furthermore, in my opinion, Britain needs a social-libertarian party of change.

This growing agitation has lead to my starting of a new chain of posts on the topic of politics and my ideologies. If you agree or disagree, thats fine – please feel free to comment. We all love alittle light hearted debate.

One thing i must make clear is that i’m no parlimentary researcher – my statistics are only what I can gather from the most reliable sources possible around the net. Thus, all my calculations can only be very rough. Please keep this in mind.

Lets get on with the show..

File sharing of Music

• What about a government that doesn’t pour money into trying to fight a loosing battle against file sharers, but makes the content available freely and subsidies the artist appropriately?

I know that is a rather fetched and costly affair, but if you pay the artists directly for the content as opposed to though middle men the price would not be too high. 40 Billion tracks were illegally file shared last year. So taking a exagerated estimate that 20% of those files were downloaded in the uk. We can do some sums…

5% of 40bn = 2bn files downloaded in the uk

45% of 79p (the actual amount an artist gets from a sale on iTunes) = 35.5p

2bn x 35.5p = £710m (total cost of subsidising all illegally downloaded music in the UK)

710m / 31.7m (number of tax payers in UK) = £22.40

So there you have it… the cost of fully subsidising all the illegal downloads in britain would be £22.40 to every tax payer for an entire year. That’s not bad considering the average tax payer pays ~£7 an hour in tax. So just over 3 hours work would cover it.

I’m going to leave you to ponder over the benefits of such a system, but think about how it could affect the following.

• Easier access to the industry for new comers
• ‘Get into arts’ schemes
• Less persecution, more help in (particularly young) peoples lives. (Gives the government a better reputation).
• Fairer deals etc. (95% of downloaded music in the world is done so illegally, make that 5% or 10% in the Uk and you’ve got a hefty salary increase – and if people want your music; then its well earnt).

Thanks alot for listening to me ramble for 400 words, I hope you feel you’ve learnt something from this post.

Sam

Where’d it go?

From the small fringe party in Sweden spawned a revolutionary anti-copyright force… but then it disappeared? In Britain anyway.

It’s a shame really… if anyone knows what happened to the Britsh Pirate Party, could they comment please?

I’d like to know more…

Sam

I hadn’t thought it would take this long…

I’m still on ‘make modules’ after about… 1.5 hours?

you would have thought with 1gb of ram and a 1.6ghz processor it would be fairly speedy…. but no.

I’ll write back on how I got the whole of arch linux to work on my netbook… when I do.

Sam

We all do it, but what do we choose to do while waiting? Ultimately we have no choice what to do, we’re just wasting time. But what we think about, we can (and always do, choose).

I’ve been sat here for around 20 minutes now, waiting for something seemingly useless. Until 2 minutes ago I was sitting, waiting, thinking about all the work I should be doing. This brings us to an interesting point, I worry while we’re bored. But rarely at any other time. It’s abit odd a thought but what if we were to never stop, we’d never worry. But if we never worried, what would we change? I think we’d probably be a lot worse off as a race if we didn’t worry.

Anyway. The end of my wait is approaching and so is the end of my ramble.

Sam

For those of you in the UK, this will be no surprise.

But for everyone else’s benefit; over the last few weeks it has snowed dramaticly here. The interesting part is the human reaction to the snow though.

In other areas of the world, falls of up to a foot per day are not uncommon. But when we British (welsh and Scotish less so) get 20 cm of snow there is mass panic. No, hysteria.

Ultimately, I’ve never heard of anyone that cannot get out of their houses (the true definition of ‘snowed in’) and if there is a fair about of grit on the roads I see no reason for the mass school closure etc.

The picture was taken on sunday night, while it was snowing at one of it’s greatest rates.

In other news, I’m going to attempt installing haiku on my netbook tomorrow (straight to HD). Will report my findings of the fledgeling OS.

Sam

..isn’t it the most amazing thing?

I took the above photo from the amazing thing?

I’m not saying my photography is great, or good even. But standing there, on the roof of that multi-story car park I was in true awe. That sky was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Sadly, I didn’t take a picture when the sun was slightly higher but I knew the camera wasn’t good enough to capture the scene correctly, so I decided it was best to just take in the moment.

Anyway, enopugh of my rambling! Good night,

Sam.

As much as I hate youtube (the majority of it anyway), I really must say it’s an invaluable resource.

Awhile ago I was researching synth’s and I found that youtube had a huge bank of fairly O.K quality demo’s of various synths.

One thing I found particularly interesting was that some of the video’s had a ‘Watch in high definition’ button, but some didn’t. I put this down to the quality of the video being uploaded having to be above a certain level, but the majority weren’t (hence the semi-random distrobution of ‘High def’ buttons).

So one I happened across a video that could be viewed at higher quality, so I pressed the button. I watched the video and noted that it was definately in stereo, not mono (something very useful to hear when researching sound modules).

A ‘&fy=18′ was added to the url when it was in high def. To cut a long story short I found it possible to force normally poor quality video’s to thier original quality just by adding ‘&fy=18′ to the url!

 

Try it yourself!

Sam