Was 1987 really too late to issue material on CD? At least they put some effort into preparing their catalogue for CD, unlike some other labels who simply used the nearest copy of the master to the pressing plant, no matter how poor quality that copy was. There was a lot of other significant material that wasn't available on CD back then.
There were a few mistakes, though. Only the first two albums should have been issued in mono, but somewhere along the line the first four appeared in this format. The next two albums were re-mixed into stereo, which wasn't wise. (Some Canadian copies of these two actually have the original UK stereo mixes). There were also some poor choices of mixes used on the Past Masters compilations of non-album tracks.
It doesn't burn a patch XP CD - it uses the normal CD. The CD you burn contains device drivers for Apple's own hardware, and possibly some other tools.
To multi-boot before this you had to use drivers that had been hacked and probably violated someones copyright. This system generates a proper driver disk, and is also probably why the download is 83GB as it'll contain drivers for all of the Intel mac platforms.
Not quite. It's the first CD issue of the US mixes which were often different to those issued in the UK and on the current CDs. Plus the Help! soundtrack features the score from the film which hasn't appeared on CD - the UK album just featured 14 Beatles songs.
Some of the CDs do, such as the Anthology and Live at The BBC sets. As these are all double CD sets, one carries the vinyl A-side label (green able) and the other the B-side label (sliced apple).
The CD issues dated from 1987 or 1988 when multicolour printing to CDs hadn't been perfected, so these typically only have plain labels. Most of their catalogue is technically on Parlophone, though.
I've a few contacts within the record industry, one of whom has dealings with the German division of EMI. It appears that the two Apples were close to a deal last year, and the Beatles catalogue almost appeared in the iTunes Music Store. But somehow things have gone wrong.
Apple Corps were also due to remaster the Beatles' back catalogue, issuing it on both CD and DVD-A. Due to disappointing sales in the UK of the later format, this was shelved, but the CD remaster will still go ahead. The current legal dispute may curtail this, though.
Finally, Neil Aspinall of Apple Corps has been working with the Beatles even longer than Ringo Starr. He started out as their driver/roadie back in 1960, over two years before Ringo joined.
Yes, but the other three went into Abbey Road Studio No. 2 on January 3rd 1970 to record George's 'I Me Mine', which surfaced on 'Let It Be' a few months later.
I tried Myth TV with a DVB-T card around a year ago. I got it working, but had to kludge together a system to grab automatic updates to the EPG that gets broadcast as part of the data stream in the UK and insert that into the main EPG database periodically.
The main problems were that the picture quality sent to a TV was no where near as good as a standard DVB-T decoder, that there was no support for the MHEG teletext system used exclusively in the UK, and the noise made by the machine was unbearably loud. I was also unable to schedule it to record radio streams.
In the end I just purchased a cheap Sagem PVR. The firmware on that was buggy at first, but they've started to iron out most of them. I still can't record radio, though!
It wasn't just Netware that died then, Banyan VINES (remember that) also suffered a similar fate, although that was due to Y2K issues with their Windows E-mail client.
I worked for a Banyan reseller back then. Most of our customer's had policies whereby everything needed to be compliant and in place by mid-1999, or even earlier. Banyan had got their OS up to date fairly quickly as they only had one point in the entire server OS that handled two digit years. However they also had a Windows E-mail client called Beyond Mail which was very problematic. As well as the conversion to 32-bit Windows resulting in a really buggy mess, the date for the release of a Y2K compliant version kept slipping further and further into 1999. Many of our customers just cut their losses, dumped the E-mail system and migrated to NT.
There was also another Banyan bug that raised it's head around the same time. Implementation of long filenames for Windows 95 and so on finally appeared, but it was implemented badly. Although it worked fine in the US which used one codepage, European support with other codepages was severely broken, and lead to damaged filesystems and data loss. As a European reseller we were stuck, and lost a couple of major sites over this.
The original machine had had various extra bits of software installed via the Fink project, such as MySQL. The Fink project is very lax at getting updates in place, and there appears to be no specific security policy, particularly if installed from the so-called 'stable' release.
It is entirely possible that one of the pieces of software installed by fink had a root exploit, perhaps using SETUID.
Fink should not be installed on production systems.
It would explain why I couldn't download a Debian DVD ISO torrent last night. My first attempt to use BitTorrent for a few months and none of the clients would work. Perhaps my ISP has already started to block torrents?
Anyway I've started an HTTP transfer instead. Should be finished by tomorrow morning.
A few years ago I once spent some time working for a contractor who had a presense at the head office of a major UK company. This company's change control system was unbelievably bad.
To make a change request of any nature, no matter how trivial, to any part of the system required filling in a form on a Notes database. This then had to be approved by senior members of 5 different departments before it could go ahead, and only if all 5 approved. One task I was involved with was setting up some software to alert when printers needed a change of toner or other consumable, which needed a firmware update to go ahead, and so I'd read the relevant page in this Notes database daily to determine if the task had been approved.
One night I was stuck in the office late waiting for some install process to finish, so I decided to read a few other entries in this database to pass the time. I was shocked by the shear technical ignorance of those responisble for denying some of these changes. How someone with such little technical knowledge could deny things on a whim was astounding, as was the delay of many months between making a request and some of the approval/disapproval entries. How some of these 'managers' got a job with such authority was beyond me.
I never got approval for the printer firmware upgrade whilst I was there - I presume it was never fixed.
There's obviously something seriously wrong with that G5 if it is taking that amount of time to boot. My G5 boots in roughly the same amount of time as that Intel iMac.
There was certainly a chip called the 82586. It was a LAN controller chip used not only by Intel but by others such as 3Com in various network interface solutions.
The card I used was called the PC586, and there's a few references to it in Google Groups. It appears to have been obsolete even by 1991. My old place of work must have acquired them second-hand or by similar means. The cards weren't that great even then, but the OS we ran was restricted to network cards for which our vendor had written a driver.
Prior to introducing the Pentium, Intel had already relased an Ethernet card called the 586, based on their 82586 chipset. I remember installing some in some servers delivered around 1992.
So these new Macs have Intel processors. But do the have all of the other motherboard resources that Windows expects to see when booting up, and are these devices exactly the same as on a PC? In other words, can the timer interrupt, real-time clock and various other doo-dahs be accessed in the same way. I presume that there are some non-trivial differences between the two, and that some PC legacy hardware is missing altogether as it's simply not needed.
That's one of the transitional kits, provided to developers to test that they've ported the code to Intel processors correctly. They were a hack job, featuring a standard PC motherboard fitted into a G5 PowerMac case, and still featured the normal PC BIOS. Many standard operating system features were missing or incomplete.
They were only designed for testing that software compiled for the Intel processors would run successfully without any endian or data-type related errors, and nothing else. They were NOT intended to show off the finally released platform.
Apple are now recalling these machines from developers, and replacing them with proper machines.
Indeed. The test performed to check that a Mersenne number is prime consists of repeated squaring, followed by the addition of an offset, using modular arithmetic. The number of iterations of the algorithm is equal to the value of the exponent of 2. If the final result is zero, the number is prime.
This only works due to the Mersenne prime being one less than a number with many known factors.
It depends if the copyright has expired. I'm not sure about the US copyright laws, but in the UK sheet music rights expire 70 years after the composer's death, at the end of the calendar year. So if your songs were very much historical they may be OK.
As Elgar, Delius and Holst all died in 1934, the original scores of their entire works expired at the end of last year. However if someone edits a score to include corrections (which can happen) the copyright expires 70 years after the editor's death. So any of their works that have been corrected by someone else will still probably be in copyright.
Firstly there's the mechanical copyright - the copyright on an actual recording. In the UK this currently expires 50 years after date that the recording was first released, independant as to where it was released. In all cases the expiration takes place at the end of the calendar year. There are a number of record companies who exploit this by issuing old recordings whose mechanical copyright has lapsed.
Secondly there the publishing copyright - the copyright on the song. This expires 70 years after the authors death. Payments for these are usually managed via a publishing company who collects the rights and passing on a percentage to the authors. So even if the mechanical copyright has lapsed, the publishing copyright still remains in place.
In the Beatles case, Northern Songs which owns the publishing rights to most of their compositions (excluding some of the earlier material, later George Harrison compositions, and Ringo two) is partly owned by Michael Jackson. The publishing company still passes the payments on, Jackson will just get some kind of financial benefit as the co-owner of the company.
So under current UK copyright law anyone will be albe to press up a copy of 'Love Me Do' (their first single, dating from 1962) from January 1st 2013, but publishing will still have to be paid to Lennon's estate until the end of 2050, and to McCartney's estate up to at least 2075.
Maybe it'll only support DVB systems, cutting down on the need to do transcoding on the fly. However Apple will have to adapt to the different DVB standards (DVB-C, DVB-T and DVB-S), as well as offering the various encryption options. They will also have to support the various output connectors used by TV systems in the world, as a composite video connection will not be good enough. There's also differences in some of the DVB implementations - for example the UK uses a different system for text applications than the rest of Europe.
There's a few DVB-T PVRs available for the UK market, but they're all flawed in one way or another. Mine has a dreadful user interface, and various serious stability problems which randomly prevent it from completing a recording.
I worked at a place that had the same policy for their Exchange system - i.e. blank passwords for everyone. Not only that, but normal users were not able to change their account passwords.
I discovered that the purpose of this was to allow the Managing Director to read everyone elses E-mail after work to see what his staff were up to. External E-mail was only available from one machine which just so happened to be next to the same person's desk, and could only be used with supervision.
I left the place after 2 days of work in disgust at this and the other equally shady practices of this dodgy company.
Slashdot Mirror
Was 1987 really too late to issue material on CD? At least they put some effort into preparing their catalogue for CD, unlike some other labels who simply used the nearest copy of the master to the pressing plant, no matter how poor quality that copy was. There was a lot of other significant material that wasn't available on CD back then.
There were a few mistakes, though. Only the first two albums should have been issued in mono, but somewhere along the line the first four appeared in this format. The next two albums were re-mixed into stereo, which wasn't wise. (Some Canadian copies of these two actually have the original UK stereo mixes). There were also some poor choices of mixes used on the Past Masters compilations of non-album tracks.
It doesn't burn a patch XP CD - it uses the normal CD. The CD you burn contains device drivers for Apple's own hardware, and possibly some other tools.
To multi-boot before this you had to use drivers that had been hacked and probably violated someones copyright. This system generates a proper driver disk, and is also probably why the download is 83GB as it'll contain drivers for all of the Intel mac platforms.
Makes me want to pick up that Macbook Pro now!
Not quite. It's the first CD issue of the US mixes which were often different to those issued in the UK and on the current CDs. Plus the Help! soundtrack features the score from the film which hasn't appeared on CD - the UK album just featured 14 Beatles songs.
Some of the CDs do, such as the Anthology and Live at The BBC sets. As these are all double CD sets, one carries the vinyl A-side label (green able) and the other the B-side label (sliced apple).
The CD issues dated from 1987 or 1988 when multicolour printing to CDs hadn't been perfected, so these typically only have plain labels. Most of their catalogue is technically on Parlophone, though.
I've a few contacts within the record industry, one of whom has dealings with the German division of EMI. It appears that the two Apples were close to a deal last year, and the Beatles catalogue almost appeared in the iTunes Music Store. But somehow things have gone wrong.
Apple Corps were also due to remaster the Beatles' back catalogue, issuing it on both CD and DVD-A. Due to disappointing sales in the UK of the later format, this was shelved, but the CD remaster will still go ahead. The current legal dispute may curtail this, though.
Finally, Neil Aspinall of Apple Corps has been working with the Beatles even longer than Ringo Starr. He started out as their driver/roadie back in 1960, over two years before Ringo joined.
Yes, but the other three went into Abbey Road Studio No. 2 on January 3rd 1970 to record George's 'I Me Mine', which surfaced on 'Let It Be' a few months later.
I tried Myth TV with a DVB-T card around a year ago. I got it working, but had to kludge together a system to grab automatic updates to the EPG that gets broadcast as part of the data stream in the UK and insert that into the main EPG database periodically.
The main problems were that the picture quality sent to a TV was no where near as good as a standard DVB-T decoder, that there was no support for the MHEG teletext system used exclusively in the UK, and the noise made by the machine was unbearably loud. I was also unable to schedule it to record radio streams.
In the end I just purchased a cheap Sagem PVR. The firmware on that was buggy at first, but they've started to iron out most of them. I still can't record radio, though!
The iPod can also play Audible's DRMed files.
It wasn't just Netware that died then, Banyan VINES (remember that) also suffered a similar fate, although that was due to Y2K issues with their Windows E-mail client.
I worked for a Banyan reseller back then. Most of our customer's had policies whereby everything needed to be compliant and in place by mid-1999, or even earlier. Banyan had got their OS up to date fairly quickly as they only had one point in the entire server OS that handled two digit years. However they also had a Windows E-mail client called Beyond Mail which was very problematic. As well as the conversion to 32-bit Windows resulting in a really buggy mess, the date for the release of a Y2K compliant version kept slipping further and further into 1999. Many of our customers just cut their losses, dumped the E-mail system and migrated to NT.
There was also another Banyan bug that raised it's head around the same time. Implementation of long filenames for Windows 95 and so on finally appeared, but it was implemented badly. Although it worked fine in the US which used one codepage, European support with other codepages was severely broken, and lead to damaged filesystems and data loss. As a European reseller we were stuck, and lost a couple of major sites over this.
The original machine had had various extra bits of software installed via the Fink project, such as MySQL. The Fink project is very lax at getting updates in place, and there appears to be no specific security policy, particularly if installed from the so-called 'stable' release.
It is entirely possible that one of the pieces of software installed by fink had a root exploit, perhaps using SETUID.
Fink should not be installed on production systems.
It would explain why I couldn't download a Debian DVD ISO torrent last night. My first attempt to use BitTorrent for a few months and none of the clients would work. Perhaps my ISP has already started to block torrents?
Anyway I've started an HTTP transfer instead. Should be finished by tomorrow morning.
Trading Standards departments do no work for the UK Government per-se, but for the Local Authority such as a County or Borough Council.
A few years ago I once spent some time working for a contractor who had a presense at the head office of a major UK company. This company's change control system was unbelievably bad.
To make a change request of any nature, no matter how trivial, to any part of the system required filling in a form on a Notes database. This then had to be approved by senior members of 5 different departments before it could go ahead, and only if all 5 approved. One task I was involved with was setting up some software to alert when printers needed a change of toner or other consumable, which needed a firmware update to go ahead, and so I'd read the relevant page in this Notes database daily to determine if the task had been approved.
One night I was stuck in the office late waiting for some install process to finish, so I decided to read a few other entries in this database to pass the time. I was shocked by the shear technical ignorance of those responisble for denying some of these changes. How someone with such little technical knowledge could deny things on a whim was astounding, as was the delay of many months between making a request and some of the approval/disapproval entries. How some of these 'managers' got a job with such authority was beyond me.
I never got approval for the printer firmware upgrade whilst I was there - I presume it was never fixed.
There's obviously something seriously wrong with that G5 if it is taking that amount of time to boot. My G5 boots in roughly the same amount of time as that Intel iMac.
There was certainly a chip called the 82586. It was a LAN controller chip used not only by Intel but by others such as 3Com in various network interface solutions.
The card I used was called the PC586, and there's a few references to it in Google Groups. It appears to have been obsolete even by 1991. My old place of work must have acquired them second-hand or by similar means. The cards weren't that great even then, but the OS we ran was restricted to network cards for which our vendor had written a driver.
Prior to introducing the Pentium, Intel had already relased an Ethernet card called the 586, based on their 82586 chipset. I remember installing some in some servers delivered around 1992.
So these new Macs have Intel processors. But do the have all of the other motherboard resources that Windows expects to see when booting up, and are these devices exactly the same as on a PC? In other words, can the timer interrupt, real-time clock and various other doo-dahs be accessed in the same way. I presume that there are some non-trivial differences between the two, and that some PC legacy hardware is missing altogether as it's simply not needed.
That's one of the transitional kits, provided to developers to test that they've ported the code to Intel processors correctly. They were a hack job, featuring a standard PC motherboard fitted into a G5 PowerMac case, and still featured the normal PC BIOS. Many standard operating system features were missing or incomplete.
They were only designed for testing that software compiled for the Intel processors would run successfully without any endian or data-type related errors, and nothing else. They were NOT intended to show off the finally released platform.
Apple are now recalling these machines from developers, and replacing them with proper machines.
Indeed. The test performed to check that a Mersenne number is prime consists of repeated squaring, followed by the addition of an offset, using modular arithmetic. The number of iterations of the algorithm is equal to the value of the exponent of 2. If the final result is zero, the number is prime.
This only works due to the Mersenne prime being one less than a number with many known factors.
It depends if the copyright has expired. I'm not sure about the US copyright laws, but in the UK sheet music rights expire 70 years after the composer's death, at the end of the calendar year. So if your songs were very much historical they may be OK.
As Elgar, Delius and Holst all died in 1934, the original scores of their entire works expired at the end of last year. However if someone edits a score to include corrections (which can happen) the copyright expires 70 years after the editor's death. So any of their works that have been corrected by someone else will still probably be in copyright.
There's two kinds of copyright in effect here.
Firstly there's the mechanical copyright - the copyright on an actual recording. In the UK this currently expires 50 years after date that the recording was first released, independant as to where it was released. In all cases the expiration takes place at the end of the calendar year. There are a number of record companies who exploit this by issuing old recordings whose mechanical copyright has lapsed.
Secondly there the publishing copyright - the copyright on the song. This expires 70 years after the authors death. Payments for these are usually managed via a publishing company who collects the rights and passing on a percentage to the authors. So even if the mechanical copyright has lapsed, the publishing copyright still remains in place.
In the Beatles case, Northern Songs which owns the publishing rights to most of their compositions (excluding some of the earlier material, later George Harrison compositions, and Ringo two) is partly owned by Michael Jackson. The publishing company still passes the payments on, Jackson will just get some kind of financial benefit as the co-owner of the company.
So under current UK copyright law anyone will be albe to press up a copy of 'Love Me Do' (their first single, dating from 1962) from January 1st 2013, but publishing will still have to be paid to Lennon's estate until the end of 2050, and to McCartney's estate up to at least 2075.
Maybe it'll only support DVB systems, cutting down on the need to do transcoding on the fly. However Apple will have to adapt to the different DVB standards (DVB-C, DVB-T and DVB-S), as well as offering the various encryption options. They will also have to support the various output connectors used by TV systems in the world, as a composite video connection will not be good enough. There's also differences in some of the DVB implementations - for example the UK uses a different system for text applications than the rest of Europe.
There's a few DVB-T PVRs available for the UK market, but they're all flawed in one way or another. Mine has a dreadful user interface, and various serious stability problems which randomly prevent it from completing a recording.
I worked at a place that had the same policy for their Exchange system - i.e. blank passwords for everyone. Not only that, but normal users were not able to change their account passwords.
I discovered that the purpose of this was to allow the Managing Director to read everyone elses E-mail after work to see what his staff were up to. External E-mail was only available from one machine which just so happened to be next to the same person's desk, and could only be used with supervision.
I left the place after 2 days of work in disgust at this and the other equally shady practices of this dodgy company.
Heard of The Quantum Clip, then? http://www.belt.demon.co.uk/product/quantum/quantu m.html
Yours for just £500.