Slashdot is a den of misinformation about the distinction between ASCAP/BMI/etc and the RIAA.
The ASCAP/BMI licenses are for the composers/authors, not the performers. Performers are the RIAA's business.
Also, contrary to the OP, everyone isn't paid. Here in the U.S. it's a random selection of broadcast logs and the amounts are pro-rated from there. I'm a nonpop (classical) composer who has been on radio hundreds of times in the U.S., but never been randomly sampled and so have never received any broadcast royalties. (On the other hand, I get royalties from European broadcasts all the time.)
It sounds like you're on to something here. Could you elaborate? (Sorry, I know it's/. and I should say something clever, but I'm interested in your thoughts.)
I use Open Office, but my wife uses MS Office -- because Open Office doesn't correctly produce interchangeable PowerPoint-style presentations in the same way Open Office will import/export a good portion of MSWord documents. It won't even load most MS PowerPoints correctly, can't export them back to PowerPoint format, and those with embedded video crash Open Office when opening or previewing.
Gibson made his niche. My comment is only about historical fact, in this case Gibson being given credit for something others did first. Being all shivery over Agrippa is cultish, not cultural.
Sorry. Gibson, though one year older than me, was a bit of a latecomer in a lot of things that other people did much earlier and had grown past by the time he discovered them. But cult fame allows history to be rewritten, doesn't it?
RobotRunAmok: as I recall the whole thing from when it debuted in '92, the use of the self-scrolling, self-encrypting gimmick was Gibson's toe-dip into a whole new creative medium.
If the encryption algorithm was the whole deal, then you may be right. Otherwise, this process of poetic generation went back 20 years or more earlier -- several technology generations, with multiple approaches to the poetic algorithms. I first encountered it on a Teletype-based machine connected via a phoneline from New York to an Illinois mainframe; that was 1973, and the paper-based output couldn't be 'encrypted'. My own interactive scrolling version first appeared publicly in 1978. It was by no means a whole new creative medium -- except perhaps to Gibson.
When I programmed Rando's Poetic License (premiered at the Washington Project for the Arts in 1978), there was deliberately no storage. The poem was not recoverable at all, and needed not algorithmic protection. That's it? Protection? Rando would scroll poems on the screen and be gone. Each time the program was re-run, a new poem was created -- sometimes a few lines, sometimes dozens or hundreds of lines. The only way to catch it was to run it to the printer, and I have a collection of 1,000 "jophxo" poems created with Rando, and my 1991 composition A Time Machine used 13 of them. The audience contributed vocabulary to the poem, so each performance had a new character -- and they would read the scrolling poems, which would be mixed into a live electronic performance.
Oh, yeah. And the Stringy-Floppy. Back in 1981, I co-designed the hardware and software for an OSI version of this beast. And don't forget 8-tracks. Really. What was I thinking?
You're confusing two problems. The tape flake-off problem is not cured by baking; it can even be made worse. I've never found a proper cure for it, so I do those transfers with a modified machine with extra-gentle handling.
The gummy tape (1980s) is cured by baking -- 36 hours minimum, rotations every two hours, then cooling for 4 hours. That's after fixing splices, removing old splices, cleaning mold, etc., and gentle winding inverted (so the slurry doesn't come off on the guides). It lasts about a week, time enough for transfer.
Can't call me. I had the office phone disconnected. There's just a home line now, and it's never picked up -- answering machine only. Relatives get used to identifying themselves, clients get used to using email, and if somebody really need to hear my voice, I'll use my SkypeOut.
I'm not sure composers are raising a ruckus on this at all. Bars and restaurants and clubs are businesses engaged in making a profit, or attempting to, and part of that profit is engendered by the music they use.
If the business owners use the music well, it will draw in customers. For an establishment open six days a week, the basic fee comes to a buck a day. How many customers does one need to attract with music to cover that buck? A restaurant that isn't selling 100 drinks a day with a one-penny surcharge isn't going to have live music anyway, is it? And for places with a cover charge, it's paid for and more, effortlessly. Music makes the business attractive, and earns money; it doesn't lose it. (I don't blame the clubs and restaurants for wanting free stuff. We all do. But casting it as a 'right' is deception.)
Creative people are embarrassed when their representatives go over the top, as ASCAP did with the Girl Scouts. But when we join ASCAP or BMI or SESAC, we are engaging in a contract with them to represent us to collect a fee that we are legally and ethically due, and they do it in the fairest way possible to everyone involved. As I've said, at least little collections of lawyers aren't running around representing a handful of artists here and there; the restaurateurs would be up to their eyeballs writing tiny royalty checks. The flat fee is a convenience that they don't have to accept. If they want to pay piece by piece, they can, but it will be another up-to-the-eyeballs situation.
I can understand why a small businessperson wouldn't understand the notion of royalties. Some guy in a bad suit comes in and says "Give me money." It feels like a shakedown, and they're certainly too busy to see that somebody is actually out there who wrote the music that brings in customers. But as musicians, the band members know full well -- and should educate those who hire them -- about who actually owns what they're playing.
To put it in a personal context, an orchestra played several of my pieces, big pieces. They never paid for their use. I've been trying for seven years to get those royalties, and finally ASCAP succeeded in having them pay up their back dues. Royalties like these are my income; I accept small commissions, which come out to a few cents an hour to create the music, and I sell printed music through my distributor, but the sheet music downloads are free. That is a fair deal.
But back to those restaurants. There are indeed other commercial music representatives out there, smaller than ASCAP and BMI and SESAC. They do exactly that, representing smaller numbers of artists, and collecting royalties for them -- usually collecting larger fees per composition than the big licensing agencies, and so younger composers are heading their way. So unless you believe no royalties should ever be due, be careful what you wish for. (And I assume you're posting from the United States, so be glad that you don't also pay the taxes on media in many other countries, where the fees go to artist agencies along with royalties.)
ASCAP composers get paid (see my first post upthread) I'm one, and they're diligent, and I like that. My income comes from that licensing, not from the sale of the original to some big company. I can pull that license any time.
ASCAP insists on dues for live music, but if any owner wants to document that the material is all original, ASCAP will accept that. They have.
Your artist friends who don't get royalties may be dealing with broadcast royalties -- these are pro-rated by random survey. But if your friends report the performances, ASCAP will collect and they will get paid.
I see many dimes -- no enough to pay the rent, but enough to pay the electric bill. I get 90% of what ASCAP collects from my performances, and every one they miss for which I have evidence (a program, recording, poster, etc.), they confirm and collect for. They're right downtown across from Lincoln Center, easy to find. Go upstairs and make an appointment with the ASCAP rep for your region.
Dennis
The radio play (etc.) was traded for the extended copyright several years ago.
The license is for live music, and the royalties (less about 10% admin) go directly to composers, and the formula, though complicated to a layperson, is pretty clear.
The license for broadcast music is different, and because of the massive number of broadcast stations, is pro-rated by random surveys.
The copyright for arrangements lies with the original owner, but arrangements of public-domain materials can be (depending on the extent of new material) be copyrightable and licensable.
The Girl Scout thing was just stupid -- even though the law was on their side, we ASCAP members (it's a membership organization where each composer votes on the board) raised a ruckus.
What's the fee? It depends. We have a performance organization and our royalty bill for 2006 was $29 because we listed what we played. Want a cheaper bill? Have the cover bands keep a performance log, and pay exactly the amount of the bill.
Nothing is hidden. ASCAP operates under a decades-old court order allowing it to represent its member artists, and has to go back to the court for every change. Otherwise, we'd each negotiate individually, and the last thing a presenter needs is to be descended on by the lawyers for thousands of composers.
I know this is Slashdot, but this multi-age mangle is just bizarre.
"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" applies to some degree to the responses to the review.
We use math for these machines because that's how they were designed. They didn't have to be, although from our perspective a half-century on, it seems impossible that they might work any other way.
Computers may need math because of how they were created, but consider that an animator didn't need math to animate, rotate or transform a figure. Though it may be reduced to math, an artist doesn't need math to give depth, shading and perspective to an image. In fact, computers make such analog tasks incredibly math-intensive, as a previous poster noted.
Despite the depth and complexity of the resulting orchestrations, no math created -- though it may describe aspects of -- Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Learning language and grammar remain elusive to mathematicians, and even Chomsky's "universal" theories end up flummoxed by the Pirahã language. The multiple readings of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland would take more time to track than the Internet in real time.
Even in the sciences from antiquity, increasing description and formulation result in increasing complexity, but not necessarily increasing understanding. Earth, air, fire and water made sense in societal context; then extended elements; then the periodic table; then subatomic particles, light as particles and waves, and behavior of quarks. Magnetism remains elusive, as does an elegant theory of everything.
Each of these may use math as a description or even a tool, but the careful tuning analysis of the different kinds of gamelans does not apply to the gamelans, but only their analysis. The reference is to itself, and the gamelans go on with or without analysis.
In other words, were our computers not based initially in creating algorithms to manipulate the basic elements chosen to operate them, impelling the ultimate triumph of binary data over other representations, math may have receded to its place as just one tool of computer activity.
I live in central Vermont, where the temperature dips to -35. I'm not sure how north you are, but when we are away, we have folks look in every day. There's a schedule and backup. We missed setting this up once, the power went out, and the pipes burst. Not only was it a mess, but we had to pull up the kitchen floor.
No technology will save you from power outages. Once the power is back up, the water pump prime can be lost and the pump burn itself out. The furnace probably needs to be hand-reset. Refrigerators, freezers, televisions, etc., can blow from power surges or freak lightning. Anything animated is a potential disaster.
If you really want to leave it empty, then others have made the right suggestions: all the water drained from the system, anti-freeze in any drain traps, power and gas shut off. Remove every scrap of food, ball up pillows into doubled plastic bags (rodents love empty houses). Seal any possible large animal entrance and close flues tightly (and leave yourself a note for when you get back).
The best advice: Get someone to live there or at least check in daily -- the latter even if you do shut everything down, so they can report the burglaries and vandalism.
Thank you for all the suggestions. You correctly guessed that by "easy", I meant a system that will run without me ever looking at a command line again -- and that includes scripting. That is, after all, why I got Windows in the first place: to lose the need to type commands or script.
Migrating text files or graphics is important, but the migration that most concerned me regards multi-channel sound projects or multimedia that I would need to be opened by a Linux program. As it stands now, the Cakewalk/Sonar and Vegas projects cannot be. But yes, there are a lot of images in vector or unflattened versions that would have to be converted from PSP to PSD (assuming Gimp can read PSD -- I haven't paid attention to that), and lots of documents in Adobe Pagemaker (even though it's discontinued, its files can be read up through generations and owners of the program, and into Indesign; there's something called Scribus for Linux, but the documentation site seems dead).
I have been to the Wine website before, and if I read it correctly, sound devices already have to work under Linux to work under Wine. The documentation is also all text and command lines, no images -- that also doesn't qualify as "easy." Even so, I went to the compatibility pages for Windows programs, and all the programs that I use for media are listed as "untested," including Finale and Sibelius, which have the largest user bases worldwide. Linux-compatible notation programs such as Lilypond are just too rudimentary.
As for USB, I think you just meant networking using USB. The network cards are PCI wireless, and I went through the Ubuntu network configuration successfully to get online through my home LAN server. That was actually very fast and painless.
All my peripherals have been replaced by USB and 1394 devices -- mostly USB. If Linux doesn't properly support them, then it's an economic problem. In my run of Ubuntu, it didn't recognize the USB Nikon slide scanner, M-Audio external sound box, or Wacom tablet. It did recognize the USB X-Drive 'image tank'. I didn't test the printers, external hard drive cages, USB Midi, flatbed scanners, or cameras; not having the first items working brought the rest of the tryout to a halt.
Again, thanks very much. It's getting closer. In any case, I do not expect to move to the next release of Windows. XP SP 2 is my final station on the Windows train, so a year or two out, I'll try the latest "easy" Linux releases.
Since this discussion has moved from arbitrarily altering an owner's machine without permission to the nearly inevitable Windows-Linux migration question, here are some thoughts.
Let's just say I'm over the hill. I used to be a programmer and hardware designer (pre-PC and pre-Mac, starting in 1977). I settled on DOS because it was there on the first PC that I bought after retiring my bunch of small computers, and Windows because of the easy migration path and the ability to run what I already had. And that's been the situation to date -- despite the best education attempts of my stepson, who is a phenomenal Linux guy and installed our entire town-wide cable access system which lets me enjoy 5MB download speeds. I have no trouble using his Linux machines for everyday office tasks.
Hear me: I want to move away from Windows, especially since the dismal experience with sluggish, messy Windows XP.
But several things have kept me from moving to Linux, despite knowing the value of open source (which I use for as many professional-level applications as possible under Windows) and knowing enough to assemble my own machines:
1. Inertia. There are six machines in the house and we both work at home. As longtime computer users, we have habits. Linux means re-learning a lot of those habits, from mousing styles to keyboard shortcuts. And it would mean learning how to connect the whole mess together and have it work -- without massively losing productivity in the meantime. That potential loss matters when you're self-employed and depend on your own knowledge and learning to get you through.
2. Migration. What to do with mailbox files that go back to 1993, for example, or more importantly, other documents created in Windows-only programs? I could save a computer just for Windows, of course, but how would I migrate these documents that are historical and artistic in nature if I need to update them? I already had that experience in moving to PCs in the early 1990s, losing nearly 15 years' worth of specialized sound work. Am I willing to do that again? I'm not sure that I am.
3. Applications. This is talked about over and over, but the dicussion often ends up with the most popular office-style applications. There are clones (and improvements) of these, and the graphics software is improving. But there are not yet functional equivalents to programs like Sonar, Finale, Sibelius, and Adobe Audition -- nor the literally hundreds of small applications that I use, some only for a few minutes each day.
4. Hardware. After total failure trying to get Red Hat to work about three years ago, I gave Ubuntu a run last week. It only recognized about half my hardware (but not any of the pro sound hardware, just the low-grade onboard audio), saw all my hard drives and network but none of the other computers on the network (all set up via TCP/IP). This was pretty darn good, but not good enough -- because the sound hardware doesn't have Linux drivers, it turns out, and without those, there was no point to pursuing it until that hardware investment is obsolete.
For users without special needs, who don't need to migrate data and who don't have deeply ingrained work habits, it looks to me like Linux in an Ubuntu-style package is about ready for everyday use.
(But I certainly wouldn't want someone taking my machine and changing a single thing about how it worked in the guise of a repair!)
I use every key on the keyboard, including the numeric keypad, with one exception: Scroll Lock.
Caps lock, yes. Windows key, yes. Menu key, yes. Insert, yes. F11, sure -- full screen mode. Caps lock, of course -- I typeset books and articles. Esc -- all the time, just to be safe on a menu that isn't clear.
The expansion of the keyboard from typewriter style was a great advance... but I go back to manual typewriters, so I remember the workarounds (such as centering by counting backspaces in 2's, and half-spaces created by holding the spacebar down).
Laptops are an enormous pain because of all the extra keystrokes. Engraving music with Finale uses the numeric keyboard all the time, and special characters (the contorted Fn+Alt+nnnn) too.
The biggest trouble in adapting to computer keyboards wasn't the extra keys, it was the change of characters above the numbers (' to @, moving parens from 8-9 to 9-0, etc.).
It isn't hard to remember keywords, but there are so many in common if they're field-specific because they are used over and over. I have my email back to 1994 as well, in Eudora. When I generally remember a topic, I know it where it may be roughly by year and topic.
These aren't generally tech topics that go stale, but nonpop music. There might be discussions about Stockhausen or Mozart with similar keyword content fifty times across a dozen years. Knowing something about the conversation is a good start to finding the conversational thread, and tying it into others that might be useful.
That's enough to narrow it down and pull the various threads together with a time & topic sort, have several mailbox windows open to compare, drag-copy the useful ones into a temporary box, bundle up the worthwhile ten or 20 or 100 messages, and export them to a text file to edit into an article.
I'm not sure how you do this without an ability to sort, but I'm guessing you have a method? Personal ways of organizing are amazing to me.
That would be me, too. There are 181 messages waiting answers in my "delayed followup" box, and the inbox is empty.
My email is archived from January 1994 in Eudora (yes, the old free version 3.0) in about 1,500 mailboxes. No spam is kept, nor lists except for useful references. It's about 950MB at this point, backed up nightly.
I rarely use the phone, as I don't like interruptions, so email has been my way for working for a long time (since Compuserve opened its email gateway about the time I signed up in 1981). Those emails were printed until email took off in the early 1990s and I switched to my own account.
Spam remains a problem. My filters (at the server and on the client) are pretty good, but there's still about 1,000 spams that get through every week.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's composers, writers and publishers.
Nothing happened to it.
Slashdot is a den of misinformation about the distinction between ASCAP/BMI/etc and the RIAA.
The ASCAP/BMI licenses are for the composers/authors, not the performers. Performers are the RIAA's business.
Also, contrary to the OP, everyone isn't paid. Here in the U.S. it's a random selection of broadcast logs and the amounts are pro-rated from there. I'm a nonpop (classical) composer who has been on radio hundreds of times in the U.S., but never been randomly sampled and so have never received any broadcast royalties. (On the other hand, I get royalties from European broadcasts all the time.)
Dennis
It sounds like you're on to something here. Could you elaborate? (Sorry, I know it's /. and I should say something clever, but I'm interested in your thoughts.)
I use Open Office, but my wife uses MS Office -- because Open Office doesn't correctly produce interchangeable PowerPoint-style presentations in the same way Open Office will import/export a good portion of MSWord documents. It won't even load most MS PowerPoints correctly, can't export them back to PowerPoint format, and those with embedded video crash Open Office when opening or previewing.
Gibson made his niche. My comment is only about historical fact, in this case Gibson being given credit for something others did first. Being all shivery over Agrippa is cultish, not cultural.
Sorry. Gibson, though one year older than me, was a bit of a latecomer in a lot of things that other people did much earlier and had grown past by the time he discovered them. But cult fame allows history to be rewritten, doesn't it?
RobotRunAmok: as I recall the whole thing from when it debuted in '92, the use of the self-scrolling, self-encrypting gimmick was Gibson's toe-dip into a whole new creative medium.
If the encryption algorithm was the whole deal, then you may be right. Otherwise, this process of poetic generation went back 20 years or more earlier -- several technology generations, with multiple approaches to the poetic algorithms. I first encountered it on a Teletype-based machine connected via a phoneline from New York to an Illinois mainframe; that was 1973, and the paper-based output couldn't be 'encrypted'. My own interactive scrolling version first appeared publicly in 1978. It was by no means a whole new creative medium -- except perhaps to Gibson.
Wait, this poem was 1992? What makes it special?
When I programmed Rando's Poetic License (premiered at the Washington Project for the Arts in 1978), there was deliberately no storage. The poem was not recoverable at all, and needed not algorithmic protection. That's it? Protection? Rando would scroll poems on the screen and be gone. Each time the program was re-run, a new poem was created -- sometimes a few lines, sometimes dozens or hundreds of lines. The only way to catch it was to run it to the printer, and I have a collection of 1,000 "jophxo" poems created with Rando, and my 1991 composition A Time Machine used 13 of them. The audience contributed vocabulary to the poem, so each performance had a new character -- and they would read the scrolling poems, which would be mixed into a live electronic performance.
Or am I missing some geeky thing that Gibson did?
Dennis
Oh, yeah. And the Stringy-Floppy. Back in 1981, I co-designed the hardware and software for an OSI version of this beast. And don't forget 8-tracks. Really. What was I thinking?
Dennis
You're confusing two problems. The tape flake-off problem is not cured by baking; it can even be made worse. I've never found a proper cure for it, so I do those transfers with a modified machine with extra-gentle handling.
The gummy tape (1980s) is cured by baking -- 36 hours minimum, rotations every two hours, then cooling for 4 hours. That's after fixing splices, removing old splices, cleaning mold, etc., and gentle winding inverted (so the slurry doesn't come off on the guides). It lasts about a week, time enough for transfer.
Dennis
It's got a serial output. Piece of cake. I used one for years, well into the Windows era.
Can't call me. I had the office phone disconnected. There's just a home line now, and it's never picked up -- answering machine only. Relatives get used to identifying themselves, clients get used to using email, and if somebody really need to hear my voice, I'll use my SkypeOut.
Somebody mod this up, please? This is the first accurate representation of the process.
I'm not sure composers are raising a ruckus on this at all. Bars and restaurants and clubs are businesses engaged in making a profit, or attempting to, and part of that profit is engendered by the music they use.
If the business owners use the music well, it will draw in customers. For an establishment open six days a week, the basic fee comes to a buck a day. How many customers does one need to attract with music to cover that buck? A restaurant that isn't selling 100 drinks a day with a one-penny surcharge isn't going to have live music anyway, is it? And for places with a cover charge, it's paid for and more, effortlessly. Music makes the business attractive, and earns money; it doesn't lose it. (I don't blame the clubs and restaurants for wanting free stuff. We all do. But casting it as a 'right' is deception.)
Creative people are embarrassed when their representatives go over the top, as ASCAP did with the Girl Scouts. But when we join ASCAP or BMI or SESAC, we are engaging in a contract with them to represent us to collect a fee that we are legally and ethically due, and they do it in the fairest way possible to everyone involved. As I've said, at least little collections of lawyers aren't running around representing a handful of artists here and there; the restaurateurs would be up to their eyeballs writing tiny royalty checks. The flat fee is a convenience that they don't have to accept. If they want to pay piece by piece, they can, but it will be another up-to-the-eyeballs situation.
I can understand why a small businessperson wouldn't understand the notion of royalties. Some guy in a bad suit comes in and says "Give me money." It feels like a shakedown, and they're certainly too busy to see that somebody is actually out there who wrote the music that brings in customers. But as musicians, the band members know full well -- and should educate those who hire them -- about who actually owns what they're playing.
To put it in a personal context, an orchestra played several of my pieces, big pieces. They never paid for their use. I've been trying for seven years to get those royalties, and finally ASCAP succeeded in having them pay up their back dues. Royalties like these are my income; I accept small commissions, which come out to a few cents an hour to create the music, and I sell printed music through my distributor, but the sheet music downloads are free. That is a fair deal.
But back to those restaurants. There are indeed other commercial music representatives out there, smaller than ASCAP and BMI and SESAC. They do exactly that, representing smaller numbers of artists, and collecting royalties for them -- usually collecting larger fees per composition than the big licensing agencies, and so younger composers are heading their way. So unless you believe no royalties should ever be due, be careful what you wish for. (And I assume you're posting from the United States, so be glad that you don't also pay the taxes on media in many other countries, where the fees go to artist agencies along with royalties.)
Dennis
We Are All Mozart
ASCAP composers get paid (see my first post upthread) I'm one, and they're diligent, and I like that. My income comes from that licensing, not from the sale of the original to some big company. I can pull that license any time.
ASCAP insists on dues for live music, but if any owner wants to document that the material is all original, ASCAP will accept that. They have.
Your artist friends who don't get royalties may be dealing with broadcast royalties -- these are pro-rated by random survey. But if your friends report the performances, ASCAP will collect and they will get paid.
Dennis
I see many dimes -- no enough to pay the rent, but enough to pay the electric bill. I get 90% of what ASCAP collects from my performances, and every one they miss for which I have evidence (a program, recording, poster, etc.), they confirm and collect for. They're right downtown across from Lincoln Center, easy to find. Go upstairs and make an appointment with the ASCAP rep for your region.
Dennis
I don't even know where to begin.
The radio play (etc.) was traded for the extended copyright several years ago.
The license is for live music, and the royalties (less about 10% admin) go directly to composers, and the formula, though complicated to a layperson, is pretty clear.
The license for broadcast music is different, and because of the massive number of broadcast stations, is pro-rated by random surveys.
The copyright for arrangements lies with the original owner, but arrangements of public-domain materials can be (depending on the extent of new material) be copyrightable and licensable.
The Girl Scout thing was just stupid -- even though the law was on their side, we ASCAP members (it's a membership organization where each composer votes on the board) raised a ruckus.
What's the fee? It depends. We have a performance organization and our royalty bill for 2006 was $29 because we listed what we played. Want a cheaper bill? Have the cover bands keep a performance log, and pay exactly the amount of the bill.
Nothing is hidden. ASCAP operates under a decades-old court order allowing it to represent its member artists, and has to go back to the court for every change. Otherwise, we'd each negotiate individually, and the last thing a presenter needs is to be descended on by the lawyers for thousands of composers.
I know this is Slashdot, but this multi-age mangle is just bizarre.
Dennis
We Are All Mozart
"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" applies to some degree to the responses to the review.
We use math for these machines because that's how they were designed. They didn't have to be, although from our perspective a half-century on, it seems impossible that they might work any other way.
Computers may need math because of how they were created, but consider that an animator didn't need math to animate, rotate or transform a figure. Though it may be reduced to math, an artist doesn't need math to give depth, shading and perspective to an image. In fact, computers make such analog tasks incredibly math-intensive, as a previous poster noted.
Despite the depth and complexity of the resulting orchestrations, no math created -- though it may describe aspects of -- Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Learning language and grammar remain elusive to mathematicians, and even Chomsky's "universal" theories end up flummoxed by the Pirahã language. The multiple readings of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland would take more time to track than the Internet in real time.
Even in the sciences from antiquity, increasing description and formulation result in increasing complexity, but not necessarily increasing understanding. Earth, air, fire and water made sense in societal context; then extended elements; then the periodic table; then subatomic particles, light as particles and waves, and behavior of quarks. Magnetism remains elusive, as does an elegant theory of everything.
Each of these may use math as a description or even a tool, but the careful tuning analysis of the different kinds of gamelans does not apply to the gamelans, but only their analysis. The reference is to itself, and the gamelans go on with or without analysis.
In other words, were our computers not based initially in creating algorithms to manipulate the basic elements chosen to operate them, impelling the ultimate triumph of binary data over other representations, math may have receded to its place as just one tool of computer activity.
Dennis
We Are All Mozart
Hi,
I live in central Vermont, where the temperature dips to -35. I'm not sure how north you are, but when we are away, we have folks look in every day. There's a schedule and backup. We missed setting this up once, the power went out, and the pipes burst. Not only was it a mess, but we had to pull up the kitchen floor.
No technology will save you from power outages. Once the power is back up, the water pump prime can be lost and the pump burn itself out. The furnace probably needs to be hand-reset. Refrigerators, freezers, televisions, etc., can blow from power surges or freak lightning. Anything animated is a potential disaster.
If you really want to leave it empty, then others have made the right suggestions: all the water drained from the system, anti-freeze in any drain traps, power and gas shut off. Remove every scrap of food, ball up pillows into doubled plastic bags (rodents love empty houses). Seal any possible large animal entrance and close flues tightly (and leave yourself a note for when you get back).
The best advice: Get someone to live there or at least check in daily -- the latter even if you do shut everything down, so they can report the burglaries and vandalism.
Good luck in the new job!
Dennis
Thank you for all the suggestions. You correctly guessed that by "easy", I meant a system that will run without me ever looking at a command line again -- and that includes scripting. That is, after all, why I got Windows in the first place: to lose the need to type commands or script.
Migrating text files or graphics is important, but the migration that most concerned me regards multi-channel sound projects or multimedia that I would need to be opened by a Linux program. As it stands now, the Cakewalk/Sonar and Vegas projects cannot be. But yes, there are a lot of images in vector or unflattened versions that would have to be converted from PSP to PSD (assuming Gimp can read PSD -- I haven't paid attention to that), and lots of documents in Adobe Pagemaker (even though it's discontinued, its files can be read up through generations and owners of the program, and into Indesign; there's something called Scribus for Linux, but the documentation site seems dead).
I have been to the Wine website before, and if I read it correctly, sound devices already have to work under Linux to work under Wine. The documentation is also all text and command lines, no images -- that also doesn't qualify as "easy." Even so, I went to the compatibility pages for Windows programs, and all the programs that I use for media are listed as "untested," including Finale and Sibelius, which have the largest user bases worldwide. Linux-compatible notation programs such as Lilypond are just too rudimentary.
As for USB, I think you just meant networking using USB. The network cards are PCI wireless, and I went through the Ubuntu network configuration successfully to get online through my home LAN server. That was actually very fast and painless.
All my peripherals have been replaced by USB and 1394 devices -- mostly USB. If Linux doesn't properly support them, then it's an economic problem. In my run of Ubuntu, it didn't recognize the USB Nikon slide scanner, M-Audio external sound box, or Wacom tablet. It did recognize the USB X-Drive 'image tank'. I didn't test the printers, external hard drive cages, USB Midi, flatbed scanners, or cameras; not having the first items working brought the rest of the tryout to a halt.
Again, thanks very much. It's getting closer. In any case, I do not expect to move to the next release of Windows. XP SP 2 is my final station on the Windows train, so a year or two out, I'll try the latest "easy" Linux releases.
Dennis
Since this discussion has moved from arbitrarily altering an owner's machine without permission to the nearly inevitable Windows-Linux migration question, here are some thoughts.
Let's just say I'm over the hill. I used to be a programmer and hardware designer (pre-PC and pre-Mac, starting in 1977). I settled on DOS because it was there on the first PC that I bought after retiring my bunch of small computers, and Windows because of the easy migration path and the ability to run what I already had. And that's been the situation to date -- despite the best education attempts of my stepson, who is a phenomenal Linux guy and installed our entire town-wide cable access system which lets me enjoy 5MB download speeds. I have no trouble using his Linux machines for everyday office tasks.
Hear me: I want to move away from Windows, especially since the dismal experience with sluggish, messy Windows XP.
But several things have kept me from moving to Linux, despite knowing the value of open source (which I use for as many professional-level applications as possible under Windows) and knowing enough to assemble my own machines:
1. Inertia. There are six machines in the house and we both work at home. As longtime computer users, we have habits. Linux means re-learning a lot of those habits, from mousing styles to keyboard shortcuts. And it would mean learning how to connect the whole mess together and have it work -- without massively losing productivity in the meantime. That potential loss matters when you're self-employed and depend on your own knowledge and learning to get you through.
2. Migration. What to do with mailbox files that go back to 1993, for example, or more importantly, other documents created in Windows-only programs? I could save a computer just for Windows, of course, but how would I migrate these documents that are historical and artistic in nature if I need to update them? I already had that experience in moving to PCs in the early 1990s, losing nearly 15 years' worth of specialized sound work. Am I willing to do that again? I'm not sure that I am.
3. Applications. This is talked about over and over, but the dicussion often ends up with the most popular office-style applications. There are clones (and improvements) of these, and the graphics software is improving. But there are not yet functional equivalents to programs like Sonar, Finale, Sibelius, and Adobe Audition -- nor the literally hundreds of small applications that I use, some only for a few minutes each day.
4. Hardware. After total failure trying to get Red Hat to work about three years ago, I gave Ubuntu a run last week. It only recognized about half my hardware (but not any of the pro sound hardware, just the low-grade onboard audio), saw all my hard drives and network but none of the other computers on the network (all set up via TCP/IP). This was pretty darn good, but not good enough -- because the sound hardware doesn't have Linux drivers, it turns out, and without those, there was no point to pursuing it until that hardware investment is obsolete.
For users without special needs, who don't need to migrate data and who don't have deeply ingrained work habits, it looks to me like Linux in an Ubuntu-style package is about ready for everyday use.
(But I certainly wouldn't want someone taking my machine and changing a single thing about how it worked in the guise of a repair!)
Dennis
Very good points, and lost in the crowd.
Anonymous C, could you please contact me so I can attribute a quote to you?
Thanks,
Dennis
http://maltedmedia.com/bathory/
I use every key on the keyboard, including the numeric keypad, with one exception: Scroll Lock.
... but I go back to manual typewriters, so I remember the workarounds (such as centering by counting backspaces in 2's, and half-spaces created by holding the spacebar down).
Caps lock, yes. Windows key, yes. Menu key, yes. Insert, yes. F11, sure -- full screen mode. Caps lock, of course -- I typeset books and articles. Esc -- all the time, just to be safe on a menu that isn't clear.
The expansion of the keyboard from typewriter style was a great advance
Laptops are an enormous pain because of all the extra keystrokes. Engraving music with Finale uses the numeric keyboard all the time, and special characters (the contorted Fn+Alt+nnnn) too.
The biggest trouble in adapting to computer keyboards wasn't the extra keys, it was the change of characters above the numbers (' to @, moving parens from 8-9 to 9-0, etc.).
Dennis
It isn't hard to remember keywords, but there are so many in common if they're field-specific because they are used over and over. I have my email back to 1994 as well, in Eudora. When I generally remember a topic, I know it where it may be roughly by year and topic.
These aren't generally tech topics that go stale, but nonpop music. There might be discussions about Stockhausen or Mozart with similar keyword content fifty times across a dozen years. Knowing something about the conversation is a good start to finding the conversational thread, and tying it into others that might be useful.
That's enough to narrow it down and pull the various threads together with a time & topic sort, have several mailbox windows open to compare, drag-copy the useful ones into a temporary box, bundle up the worthwhile ten or 20 or 100 messages, and export them to a text file to edit into an article.
I'm not sure how you do this without an ability to sort, but I'm guessing you have a method? Personal ways of organizing are amazing to me.
Dennis
That would be me, too. There are 181 messages waiting answers in my "delayed followup" box, and the inbox is empty.
My email is archived from January 1994 in Eudora (yes, the old free version 3.0) in about 1,500 mailboxes. No spam is kept, nor lists except for useful references. It's about 950MB at this point, backed up nightly.
I rarely use the phone, as I don't like interruptions, so email has been my way for working for a long time (since Compuserve opened its email gateway about the time I signed up in 1981). Those emails were printed until email took off in the early 1990s and I switched to my own account.
Spam remains a problem. My filters (at the server and on the client) are pretty good, but there's still about 1,000 spams that get through every week.
Dennis