Nifty trolling. But the UK doesn't have enough land to grow enough produce to feed its current population. Without drastic population reduction (unachievable without significant economic strife) we need imports.
TOA refers to wild coffee. You think the wild coffee will magically migrate along with the climate patterns? Leaping over any unsuitable terrain?
Even for farmed coffee, I can foresee significant obstacles to moving production. Will there be enough land at the new latitude? Will whatever is currently grown there also be displaced? If not, where can the coffee go? Is the terrain suitable?
In general, radio stations don't like to upset their audiences. In the case of the BBC, the regulators don't like licence payers to be upset.
Swearing is considered acceptable on post-watershed programmes, when a warning is given. John Peel RIP used to give a little warning at the start of his show, after which it was anything goes (in terms of the records he'd play).
Actually last year they tried to get the original version of Hallelujah (The song covered by the X-Factor winner) to #1
[pedant] The campaign was for the Rufus Wainwright version. The original was by Leonard Cohen. The X-Factor version's arrangement mimicked the Rufus Wainwright version however.
I do agree with all of this. My original post was only intended to counter the frequent "don't even write their own songs" criticism.
As you say, X-Factor fodder is much worse than this. It's usually a cover of an already well known song. The arrangement is done by a professional, with an eye towards being as safe as possible. The backing is performed by musicians who's job is to play what they're given without question. Nobody involved has a mandate to be creative.
But compare this to the still extremely commercial output of Girls Aloud, and acts like them.
They don't write their own songs, but they get the cream of the material sold to the record company by talented commercial songwriters.
They're produced by talented and creative producer/musicians who come up with stuff that rock snobs might not like, but which I would argue cannot be described as assembly line pop (unlike the hated Stock-Aitken-Waterman 'hit factory' of the 80s).
You *can* combine a songwriter who doesn't perform, a production team who are not the act, a singer who is not an instrumentalist, and put them together to make something of value.
(As soon as I saw this article, I knew that the tired anti-Facebook groupthink that people have here on Slashdot would dominate. If Facebook hadn't been involved, everyone would be amused by it, not hating it.)
There was a lot of buzz on Twitter too. I mean in the Twitterverse.
Insofar as selling more singles than anyone else, during an arbitrarily(*) decided time period is important...
... more singles are sold in the week leading up to Christmas than any other week - gifts, parties etc. - so it's the week with the most competition. You wouldn't choose to release a single that week, unless you thought it was very strong.
Downloads throw the equation out by quite a bit though. As has been demonstrated, a track doesn't need a "release" to sell.
Without a "campaign", Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is high in the UK charts, purely because Joe McXFactor performed it a couple of times on the show. Or maybe because of Family Guy...
this is no Xmas Ditty but a polemical rant against the 'Machine', which I guess means Corporations/Governments/Hegemony.
As far as I can tell, the song is actually about "The Establishment" sending young men to war, to die for the establishment's cause, not their own. Then decorating them with medals, as if to justify it.
And if you can't get righteously angry about something like that at Christmas time, when can you?
OTOH like all the best pop songs, the lyrics are ambiguous enough that anyone can superimpose whatever issues with authority they have.
in the UK and Australia, there is general agreement on how most of these things are handled; and where there are policy differences, they often don't come to pass.
This is nonsense. You could get glasses for free on the NHS until 1984, when the Tory government abolished them. If Labour had been in power, this wouldn't have happened.
If I don't watch the news, who is in power makes zero impact on my life.
It affects whether you have a job, or at least whether the people around you have jobs. It affects how criminals who may affect your life are handled. It affects the quality of the schools your children go to, or the education levels of the people you meet in everyday life. It affects how and whether you pay for dental work, eye tests and glasses, medical care. It affects how much tax you pay, and how the funds generated are spent.
Amazon.co.uk sold both downloads as loss leaders. The 40p limit applies to the wholesale price, not the retail price.
- I pay Amazon 29p
- Amazon pays Sony 40p (or more?)
- It counts towards the chart
- Amazon hopes my retail experience was good, and I'll come back for more music downloads in future. This time at a profitable price.
And there is the further question as to whether or not it is more 'anti-establishment' being told what to buy by some a TV offering or some grassroots facebook campaign
I think there's a huge difference. One product was pushed by a multi-million pound commercial machine over dozens of hours of prime-time TV, endlessly gossiped about in the papers and on the radio. The other was pushed by a part-time rock DJ making a Facebook page. These things are worlds apart.
what the protest group was trying to do was to stop some bland, middle-of-the-road, one-hit-wonder from getting #1 when it should be going to someone who at least has the where-with-all to write their own goddamn songs.
I agree that the X-Factor effort is bland pap that doesn't deserve to sell (and let's not forget that it *did* sell by the bucket load. This isn't a zero-sum game.)
However I question this fetishisation of acts who write their own material. Writing and performing are orthogonal talents. One person can have both, but having one talent in isolation is not something to be demeaned. Burt Bacharach was a fine songwriter. He sometimes performs them himself, and it's OK, but not that great. Most people would rather hear the Walker Brothers perform "Make It Easy On Yourself" than Bacharach himself.
Before The Beatles it was really quite rare for pop acts to write their own material.
Ask yourself, what would you rather? A great band performing a bad song written by themselves? Or a great band performing a great song written by someone else?
And what would you say to a great songwriter who's a weak performer? Stop writing?
It was supposedly a kick against the commercialism of Christmas and commercial dominance in the music scene
Supposed by whom?
All it was, was a couple of people saying "wouldn't it be cool if {classic rock song with apt band name} were Christmas number one instead of the pappy ballad that's supposedly a foregone conclusion. It was an idea with memetic fitness, so it took off.
Each individual's reason for buying is their own. Whether it's a perceived statement against capitalism, just a kick against the man, or even really liking the song and somehow not already owning a copy.
FWIW, my reason for taking part was that I thought it would be funny and cool if it worked, and the outlay was 29 pence. If it sends a message to Sony that there's good money to be made promoting non-manufactured bands, so much the better.
At that resolution, does the grain of the film show?
It depends on the film and processing. In many feature films the grain is visible - it's a feature. But film grain granularity is the closest you'll get to "resolution" in analogue world.
For a real comparison, we'd need dots-per-square-mm versus grains-per-square-mm at the same projection size.
Resolution of domestic display/distribution technologies is not relevant. We need the capture capabilities of pro cameras.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you provide a list of things you do eat, drink, use?
You know, a whitelist so we don't waste our time worrying about things that don't affect LWATCDR in future...
Nifty trolling. But the UK doesn't have enough land to grow enough produce to feed its current population. Without drastic population reduction (unachievable without significant economic strife) we need imports.
TOA refers to wild coffee. You think the wild coffee will magically migrate along with the climate patterns? Leaping over any unsuitable terrain?
Even for farmed coffee, I can foresee significant obstacles to moving production. Will there be enough land at the new latitude? Will whatever is currently grown there also be displaced? If not, where can the coffee go? Is the terrain suitable?
Climate change however has been outed as the scam it is
Where?
And if you say the CRU email leaks, you'd better have new and significant findings from in there, because I haven't seen evidence of a scam yet.
Presumably Grand Theft Auto IV's developers mo-capped strippers, and that shipped.
Be funny?
You're right on both counts.
Although the brackets was just me being too lazy to type > and <. Which backfired because now I've typed & three times.
It upsets people.
In general, radio stations don't like to upset their audiences. In the case of the BBC, the regulators don't like licence payers to be upset.
Swearing is considered acceptable on post-watershed programmes, when a warning is given. John Peel RIP used to give a little warning at the start of his show, after which it was anything goes (in terms of the records he'd play).
It's the song you're going to hear ad nauseum in every supermarket, bar and living room for the next two weeks of holidays
I'd be delighted to be proved wrong, but I don't thing supermarkets etc. will be adding Rage to their background music repertoire.
Nor do I expect that Killing In The Name will appear on the "Now That's What I Call Christmas 2010" compilation CD set, as wonderful as that would be.
Actually last year they tried to get the original version of Hallelujah (The song covered by the X-Factor winner) to #1
[pedant]
The campaign was for the Rufus Wainwright version. The original was by Leonard Cohen. The X-Factor version's arrangement mimicked the Rufus Wainwright version however.
Load of schmaltzy rubbish anyway IMO.
[/pedant]
Well there ya go :)
I'll stand by the bit about ambiguity.
I do agree with all of this. My original post was only intended to counter the frequent "don't even write their own songs" criticism.
As you say, X-Factor fodder is much worse than this. It's usually a cover of an already well known song. The arrangement is done by a professional, with an eye towards being as safe as possible. The backing is performed by musicians who's job is to play what they're given without question. Nobody involved has a mandate to be creative.
But compare this to the still extremely commercial output of Girls Aloud, and acts like them.
They don't write their own songs, but they get the cream of the material sold to the record company by talented commercial songwriters.
They're produced by talented and creative producer/musicians who come up with stuff that rock snobs might not like, but which I would argue cannot be described as assembly line pop (unlike the hated Stock-Aitken-Waterman 'hit factory' of the 80s).
You *can* combine a songwriter who doesn't perform, a production team who are not the act, a singer who is not an instrumentalist, and put them together to make something of value.
(As soon as I saw this article, I knew that the tired anti-Facebook groupthink that people have here on Slashdot would dominate. If Facebook hadn't been involved, everyone would be amused by it, not hating it.)
There was a lot of buzz on Twitter too. I mean in the Twitterverse.
Does that help?
Oh.
Why does it matter?
Insofar as selling more singles than anyone else, during an arbitrarily(*) decided time period is important...
Downloads throw the equation out by quite a bit though. As has been demonstrated, a track doesn't need a "release" to sell.
Without a "campaign", Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is high in the UK charts, purely because Joe McXFactor performed it a couple of times on the show. Or maybe because of Family Guy...
(*) Unless you believe in Jewish/Christian God
this is no Xmas Ditty but a polemical rant against the 'Machine', which I guess means Corporations/Governments/Hegemony.
As far as I can tell, the song is actually about "The Establishment" sending young men to war, to die for the establishment's cause, not their own. Then decorating them with medals, as if to justify it.
And if you can't get righteously angry about something like that at Christmas time, when can you?
OTOH like all the best pop songs, the lyrics are ambiguous enough that anyone can superimpose whatever issues with authority they have.
Amazon actually made a loss on each sale, passing on 40p (or possibly more) from each sale.
in the UK and Australia, there is general agreement on how most of these things are handled; and where there are policy differences, they often don't come to pass.
This is nonsense. You could get glasses for free on the NHS until 1984, when the Tory government abolished them. If Labour had been in power, this wouldn't have happened.
Repeat for 1000s of other policy decisions.
You don't rate Dionne Warwick's "Walk on By"?
Or The Stranglers' "Walk On By"?
The Beatles' "Roll Over Beethoven"?
I used to take this view that people didn't "really" like mainstream film/music/whatever, they only "think they like it".
Then I realised that was the worst kind of condescending attitude. Lots of people like mainstream media output, and that's what makes it mainstream.
If I don't watch the news, who is in power makes zero impact on my life.
It affects whether you have a job, or at least whether the people around you have jobs.
It affects how criminals who may affect your life are handled.
It affects the quality of the schools your children go to, or the education levels of the people you meet in everyday life.
It affects how and whether you pay for dental work, eye tests and glasses, medical care.
It affects how much tax you pay, and how the funds generated are spent.
I could go on, but I think the point is made.
Amazon.co.uk sold both downloads as loss leaders. The 40p limit applies to the wholesale price, not the retail price.
- I pay Amazon 29p
- Amazon pays Sony 40p (or more?)
- It counts towards the chart
- Amazon hopes my retail experience was good, and I'll come back for more music downloads in future. This time at a profitable price.
Everybody's happy.
And there is the further question as to whether or not it is more 'anti-establishment' being told what to buy by some a TV offering or some grassroots facebook campaign
I think there's a huge difference. One product was pushed by a multi-million pound commercial machine over dozens of hours of prime-time TV, endlessly gossiped about in the papers and on the radio. The other was pushed by a part-time rock DJ making a Facebook page. These things are worlds apart.
what the protest group was trying to do was to stop some bland, middle-of-the-road, one-hit-wonder from getting #1 when it should be going to someone who at least has the where-with-all to write their own goddamn songs.
I agree that the X-Factor effort is bland pap that doesn't deserve to sell (and let's not forget that it *did* sell by the bucket load. This isn't a zero-sum game.)
However I question this fetishisation of acts who write their own material. Writing and performing are orthogonal talents. One person can have both, but having one talent in isolation is not something to be demeaned. Burt Bacharach was a fine songwriter. He sometimes performs them himself, and it's OK, but not that great. Most people would rather hear the Walker Brothers perform "Make It Easy On Yourself" than Bacharach himself.
Before The Beatles it was really quite rare for pop acts to write their own material.
Ask yourself, what would you rather? A great band performing a bad song written by themselves? Or a great band performing a great song written by someone else?
And what would you say to a great songwriter who's a weak performer? Stop writing?
It was supposedly a kick against the commercialism of Christmas and commercial dominance in the music scene
Supposed by whom?
All it was, was a couple of people saying "wouldn't it be cool if {classic rock song with apt band name} were Christmas number one instead of the pappy ballad that's supposedly a foregone conclusion. It was an idea with memetic fitness, so it took off.
Each individual's reason for buying is their own. Whether it's a perceived statement against capitalism, just a kick against the man, or even really liking the song and somehow not already owning a copy.
FWIW, my reason for taking part was that I thought it would be funny and cool if it worked, and the outlay was 29 pence. If it sends a message to Sony that there's good money to be made promoting non-manufactured bands, so much the better.
That doesn't tell us much.
So it's standard to scan 35mm film at 2000 lines.
At that resolution, does the grain of the film show?
It depends on the film and processing. In many feature films the grain is visible - it's a feature. But film grain granularity is the closest you'll get to "resolution" in analogue world.
For a real comparison, we'd need dots-per-square-mm versus grains-per-square-mm at the same projection size.
Resolution of domestic display/distribution technologies is not relevant. We need the capture capabilities of pro cameras.