PBCliberal
Feb 12th, 2005, 11:04 AM
The thread on lousy-sounding line ins took me down this twisted mental path, that wound up at Lucretius' "On the nature of things," so the thread topic is Latin for "On the nature of Now." (My Latin's a little shaky, mea culpa.)
The development of computers, particularly Micro$oft archeteture computers, has been this tug of war between taking time to do something, or doing it right now. One of the primary changes between NT 3.x and the archetectures of 2000/XP was abandonment of the original intent of NT to keep developers as far away from the actual hardware as possible, and to only let those nasty software guys see it through the implementation of a virtual machine in which all the differences between real hardware variants is masked to look like the same gear by an "abstraction layer." This was in the days when Microsoft was hell bent for leather to support non I386-based CPUs.
In Classical terms, this is an allegory for the Cave Myth (http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/greek/philosopher/myth_allegory_cave_plato.html) in Plato's Republic.
When it became obvious that, if we couldn't get access to the real hardware in real time, everybody from game developers to audio post folks to non-linear video editing and compositing software designers would be on the bus to AppleLand faster than you could say "500 millisenconds of latency." WindowsWorld turned on its axis.
So there was this big powow, and the concept of .vxd wound up in the dumpsters at Redmond. And there was joy in the camps where you needed to hear mixes in real time, or play synthesizers without it having to go through a pipe so long it looked like Blue Man Group on acid.
But now we're back fighting the battle again, because the primum mobile driving today's "multimedia computer" is the ability to play back intricate, highly compressed synchronized audio-video. The holy grail is HD, with its awesome screen resolutions and concurrent 5.1 digital audio.
So latency has been resurrected, and mass-consumer audio chips like the Realteks (http://www.realtek.com.tw/products/products1-2.aspx?modelid=2004058) that wind up in a tremendous number of consumer-level Intel-based motherboards have gone to the dark side. When your video channel is trying to figure out how the compression codec packed an HD image in a tiny box, and how this latest frame differs from the last keyframe, the audio codec has enough time to strip out 5.1 audio and call Papa Johns for a pizza.
And that means that we, fellow podcasters, producers, audio post hangers-on and C.B. deMille wannabees, are in a cult, where we see the world totally differently than the audio/video consumers.
The difference is De Nudius Natura; the nature of now. For I386 platform geeks, it means you need a professional audio card, even if you're only post-producing from totally digital sources so that shitty A/D implementations never touch the actual product. The reason, is the mindset of the card designers in the way they handle DSP and the driver-writing-geeks in the way they handle assembly code. They support our cultish view of now. And so do the gamers.
Meanwhile, we need to try to break a very nasty habit, which, like the concept of "dialing" a telephone that hasn't had a "dial" in 40 years, may be impossible to change,
For listeners, their "now" is something totally different than our "now." It is something that is as hidden to us as the hardware abstraction layer in Bill Gates' NT3 nightmare. Its something they can make over and over again by manipulation of their jog shuttle on their personal listening device.
And it means we are never coming to anybody "live," and "Good Morning," "Good Afternoon," "Good Evening," and "Today" are totally vacuous concepts that reveal with every saying that we don't understand our own technology and haven't granted to our listeners the greatest gift that podcasting brings. Nudius Naturum has changed,
The development of computers, particularly Micro$oft archeteture computers, has been this tug of war between taking time to do something, or doing it right now. One of the primary changes between NT 3.x and the archetectures of 2000/XP was abandonment of the original intent of NT to keep developers as far away from the actual hardware as possible, and to only let those nasty software guys see it through the implementation of a virtual machine in which all the differences between real hardware variants is masked to look like the same gear by an "abstraction layer." This was in the days when Microsoft was hell bent for leather to support non I386-based CPUs.
In Classical terms, this is an allegory for the Cave Myth (http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/greek/philosopher/myth_allegory_cave_plato.html) in Plato's Republic.
When it became obvious that, if we couldn't get access to the real hardware in real time, everybody from game developers to audio post folks to non-linear video editing and compositing software designers would be on the bus to AppleLand faster than you could say "500 millisenconds of latency." WindowsWorld turned on its axis.
So there was this big powow, and the concept of .vxd wound up in the dumpsters at Redmond. And there was joy in the camps where you needed to hear mixes in real time, or play synthesizers without it having to go through a pipe so long it looked like Blue Man Group on acid.
But now we're back fighting the battle again, because the primum mobile driving today's "multimedia computer" is the ability to play back intricate, highly compressed synchronized audio-video. The holy grail is HD, with its awesome screen resolutions and concurrent 5.1 digital audio.
So latency has been resurrected, and mass-consumer audio chips like the Realteks (http://www.realtek.com.tw/products/products1-2.aspx?modelid=2004058) that wind up in a tremendous number of consumer-level Intel-based motherboards have gone to the dark side. When your video channel is trying to figure out how the compression codec packed an HD image in a tiny box, and how this latest frame differs from the last keyframe, the audio codec has enough time to strip out 5.1 audio and call Papa Johns for a pizza.
And that means that we, fellow podcasters, producers, audio post hangers-on and C.B. deMille wannabees, are in a cult, where we see the world totally differently than the audio/video consumers.
The difference is De Nudius Natura; the nature of now. For I386 platform geeks, it means you need a professional audio card, even if you're only post-producing from totally digital sources so that shitty A/D implementations never touch the actual product. The reason, is the mindset of the card designers in the way they handle DSP and the driver-writing-geeks in the way they handle assembly code. They support our cultish view of now. And so do the gamers.
Meanwhile, we need to try to break a very nasty habit, which, like the concept of "dialing" a telephone that hasn't had a "dial" in 40 years, may be impossible to change,
For listeners, their "now" is something totally different than our "now." It is something that is as hidden to us as the hardware abstraction layer in Bill Gates' NT3 nightmare. Its something they can make over and over again by manipulation of their jog shuttle on their personal listening device.
And it means we are never coming to anybody "live," and "Good Morning," "Good Afternoon," "Good Evening," and "Today" are totally vacuous concepts that reveal with every saying that we don't understand our own technology and haven't granted to our listeners the greatest gift that podcasting brings. Nudius Naturum has changed,