DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

That Apple’s market share has dropped to a small fraction of Wintel’s is old news. But there’s a new explanation.

Paul Murphy of LinuxInsider points out that Apple’s unit sales have been increasing over the years. That seems like a conflict: if Apple is selling more machines than before, why isn’t the Mac gaining market share? Is the rest of the world buying that many more Wintel boxes?

Yes, but not for the reason you might expect: this is not about rapid adoption of Wintel by new computer users. Murphy argues, instead, that all those additional Wintel unit sales are upgrades.

Apple’s declining relative market share measured in dollars has been due more to the expense of Wintel product churn than to a fall-off of interest among Mac users. Over the longer term, Apple’s unit sales have consistently increased; what caused the decline in Apple’s annual share of market dollars has been growth in revenue to the PC sellers.

It’s Wintel’s rapid upgrade cycle that’s been getting progressively more and more out of line with norms for industrial or retail electronics products, and therefore not falling interest in the Mac, that’s behind the numbers. Think about this for a minute: If PCs remained usable as long as Macs do, industrywide total revenues (aka customer costs) would be nearly two-thirds lower.

Murphy’s editorial segues into the tale of a Wintel bigot, who in spite of repeated and obvious failures of his chosen OS continues to denigrate alternatives. It’s just another proof that the human organism is hardwired for fraud — to quote George Lakoff, “people think in terms of frames and metaphors … when the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.”

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posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2005-01-24 16:25:20

Nobody needs that much root beer.

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posted to channel: Food & Cooking
updated: 2005-01-30 07:22:01

It’s poetry, it’s art, it’s disturbing as hell: SimpleLife.com’s Pesticide Statistics

The Simplelife site provides original sources for the statements in the above list.

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posted to channel: Conservation
updated: 2005-01-21 22:12:26

The guitar was a Fender Stratocaster played through a Marshall head and a 4x10 Marshall cabinet. Two mics were pointed at the same speaker. The following excerpt demonstrates the difference in sound between the two mics.

It’s a 4-bar passage featuring guitar and drums. For the first pass, the SM57 channel was solo’d. For the second, the Beyerdynamic M-380 channel was solo’d. For the third, I mixed the two: the Beyer is panned hard to right, the Shure about 30% left, and the volumes adjusted so the two channels sound equal in volume.

No effects or EQ have been applied; these are the raw guitar sounds.

Ode To Soup — Guitar Sounds (4 bars SM-57, 4 bars M-380, 4 bars mixed, repeat)

The most startling effect is the width of the stereo image as compared to either solo mic. I think the SM-57 sound is good on its own, but I like the stereo version better.

Tags: sm57,, recording,, guitar,, m380
posted to channel: Music
updated: 2008-05-06 03:24:02

My guitarist friend Steve recorded four takes of the main guitar track for my song, Ode to Soup. Then he recorded two harmony tracks for the second half of the chorus, plus a “powerchord” track for two of the verses. It’s an awesome arrangement, and really took the song to the next level.

But it left me with about twenty tracks of guitar to mix down. (Remember that the guitar was recorded with two microphones, doubling the amount of data to manage as well as the number of edits needed.)

The fourth take was labelled the “keeper” — meaning that at tracking time, we felt it was the best of the lot. But no single take is perfect, and even more importantly, what seems perfect in performance rarely stands up to the scrutiny of repeated playback. When I was finally mentally prepared for the task (read: I’d futzed with everything else for a week without making any substantive progress) I listened closely to all four takes and made notes about what I liked in each. What I found surprised me: I had indeed captured guitar magic, but it was spread evenly across all four takes.

Combining them was a challenge. I used a technique advocated by ProTools book author David Franz, whose Digizine article about creating a comp vocal track describes the process. It can be used for any instrument, including multi-tracked instruments. It could even be used to edit drums, although you’ll develop RSI in the process.

The trick is selecting exactly the same material from two tracks and pasting it into two other tracks. Selection accuracy is key; if I pasted the chorus from the Beyer mic even one sample off from the position of the SM57 version of the chorus, the guitar sound would change, or could even be out of phase. I needed the comped SM57 track to be identical, in terms of edits and transitions, to the Beyer track.

Of course, it’s not as easy as simply copying and pasting. Each such edit brings an opportunity for a bad transition. Crossfading between passages fixes many such problems, but in several cases the notes didn’t line up — Steve improvised some of the sections, and the basic material was different. I used ProTools’ TCE — time compression and expansion — widget to stretch out some passages to compensate for notes I’d clipped out.

The longest such edit happens right before the first harmony section. I needed to replace about a half-second of audio to make the edit work. Stretching a note that long with TCE seems to make it go flat. Also, because I had to repeat the edit for the Beyer mic track, the stereo image moves around. The combination is either a neat effect or a mistake. But I guess that happens a lot in recording, and you don’t know until the 100th listen which it is.

Pictured is my workspace in the midst of the guitar comp.

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posted to channel: Music
updated: 2005-01-20 23:48:13