Look, Slashbots, if you want to spend your money supporting Russian crime syndicates, that's just great. Please post you home address so somebody who lost his kneecaps over this site knows where to get a new pair.
Hmm... criticising Russian mafia... better post Anonymously...
Anyway, swerving back on topic, the part of the article that caught my eye was this:
One suggestion is that labels want to introduce variable pricing - so they can charge more for top selling tracks.
You know what? I'm all for it... if it means they are willing to discount the less-popular stuff in exchange. Then people who want to pay four bucks a song for the latest "boy band" can do so, and I can get all my favorite fucked-up indie stuff on the cheap. It's win-win!
This week, I set foot in a record store for the first time in months. New CD's cost more than a lot of film DVD's now! Eighteen bucks!? For last year's Liz Phair album!? I don't think so. When I think about the fact that I was in a "budget" warehouse, I shudder to think what the mall stores are charging. Even the used CD's at this join were occasionally as high as twelve dollars each... Making the iTunes Music Store the cheapest way in town for me to get some albums. (Well... apart from supporting organized crime families, anyway.) I'm not at all surprised the labels want to haggle for a better deal.
They bit all these black american blues artists. All they did was popularize it.
Totally disagree. Lennon & McCarntey owe at least as much to Rogers and Hammerstein as they do to Elmore James. Also, the close-harmony singing of their early albums certainly did not come from the blues. It came from their own local music.
Everything came from somewhere, but the Beatles at least built upon their influences to create things the world never heard before. Even their sound guys were doing things in radically new ways.
Example: McCartney really liked the "big" bass sound on Phil Specter records, and wanted a heavier sound from his bass. The engineers at abbey road took two huge woofer cabinets, and wired one of them as the microphone to record the bass signal coming from other. The result is the mind-blowing (almost underwater-like) bass sound you hear on many of the later Beatles recordings.
Your comments reveal that you simply miss the point.
The appeal of anime is a direct result of the fact that it's cheap to make. The low cost means it is a low-risk investment, which means that an Anime creator has far fewer studio pressures than somebody making a US movie or TV show.
Like I said in another comment, "Haibane Renmei" could never be made for US television. Not because there's nobody writing for TV who's as smart as ABe, but because no TV writer or director has the power to realize a vision which is so unique and fails to fit into any easy-to-sell "genre."
The same is true of "Kino's Journey," a show which is a hybrid of a road buddy picture, and a smarter, more spiritual "Twilight Zone."
If you can't follow the plots of such shows, I would not suggest bragging about it.
Is 99% of anime as good as the stuff I just mentioned? No. Then again, neither is 99.999% of US media.
No, Jon Katz was sinserely wrong. He watched Buffy reruns and thought he understood modern teens, read Kevin Mitnick interviews in 2600 and thought he understood hacker culture, read Slashdot comments and thought they were a representative sample of American geeks. I think he was genuinely surprised at how detested some of his rambling became around here.
Dvorak, on the other hand, knows better. He knows that if he calls the iBook 300 "girly" or says that Linux-on-Windows will put Red Hat, Debian, and Gentoo out of business, people will rush to the web site to read his rubbish, and then comment on it it forums, link to it on blogs and slash sites, and go to great lengths to alert the world about how wrong he is... all of which gets his site hits, and makes his publisher very happy with him. He's laughing all the way to the bank, because his goal is not to be seen as insightful, but simply to be seen.
Does anybody still take a word that says seriously anymore? All he ever does is troll for ad hits by saying something which will piss off one fringe group of computer geeks or another.
My local PBS station provides more interesting information and culture in a week of programs than I get from a year's subscription to The Atlantic Monthly.
Most of TV is banal amusement, sure, but there have been many shows which feature far better writing and acting than can be found anywhere in my local theater district. The best example among the current crop of shows is probably "Lost."
Nothing by Ayn Rand belongs in a library, unless the library happens to have public toilets.
Any writer hated that strongly by a small group of angry critics belongs in every library in America. She might be wrong, but she certainly provokes discussion and critical thinking.
If there wasn't an Ayn Rand to spell out exactly what objectivism is, I would not know that I'm not an objectivist.
Any library which does not have both "Catcher in the Rye" and "Mein Kampf" might as well be turned into a Wal-Mart.
Plus, the problem with Franklin (God love him) is that he almost never produced an original thought. He just paraphrased the philosophies of revolutionary French thinkers.
Even most of the "penny saved is a penny earned" crap from his Almanac, which he still frequently gets credit for coming up with, are old sayings he picked up from the French and simply translated into English.
People who really want to understand the seeds of Democracy and freedom in the US will generally read Voltaire and Toqueville, not Ben Franklin.
Indeed. It takes a great deal of skill for a performer to press down the keys of the keyboard without making a sound. If a single note escapes the piano, you have played the piece improperly. If you press the wrong key, you have played the piece improperly (though it's hard to imagine how a large audience could tell this).
When played CORRECTLY, Cage's work is a masterpiece. When the pianist sits silent for 273 seconds, it's just silly.
You could not be more wrong.
Miming that you are playing an instrument is 100% the wrong way to perform 4'33". It is a "chance music" composition which is supposed to be entirely about the environmental sounds. Any choreographed distractions on the part of the performer completely distract from what the piece is supposed to be.
See the 1990 American Masters documentary on John Cage, in which he states explicitly, "4'33" was written note by note."
As with any dispute of fact, it's Google to the rescue:
4'33" was written in the summer of 1952 just after Cage returned to New York City from Black Mountain College, where he had been invited to participate as a teacher and composer in this rural, private-school environment, and worked with other important figures in the art world. It was here that Rauschenberg did his White Paintings (1951) and Cage first saw them, provoking 4'33". It was here that the first multimedia "happening" occurred, Cage's Theater Piece No. 1, in which many of the faculty participated. It was also here that Cage planned work on Williams Mix and first used the time bracket notation that became so prevalent in his later music.
4'33" is written for any instrument or combination of instruments. It is, however, usually done as a piano piece. This is probably because of the precedent set by the premiere performance, since the score does not specify a piano or any other instrument. The score is in three movements. Curiously, it has existed in at least six different versions (two different manuscripts and four different editions), although only two of these are different in performance.
The original Woodstock manuscript, dated August 1952, is now lost and was written in conventional grand staff notation, containing measures of silence. It is here referred to as the Woodstock ms. It was this score that David Tudor used for the premiere performance. Tudor made at least two reconstructions of this score for his own performances.
The original was on music paper, with staffs, and it was laid out in measures like the Music of Changes except there were no notes. But the time was there, notated exactly like the Music of Changes except that the tempo never changed, and there were no occurrences -- just blank measures, no rests -- and the time was easy to compute. The tempo was 60.
So there you go. No notes. The process of composition being described as "note for note" was just Cage's overcompensation due to his worry about his work being taken as a joke if he did not go out of his way to put effort into creating it.
Actually, according to what the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) said in 1997, the most popular jukebox selection of all time is Patsy Cline's recording of "Crazy."
It's a cute story though. I could see why you would want it to be true.
IIRC, there were no "notes" involved. Simply a time signature, a tempo, and a set number of tacet measures.
Also, closing the piano case between movements is just showmanship. It's not part of the composition, although it was an important part of his performance of it. The piece has been "transcribed" for French Horn and various other instruments over the years.
Also building your own MP3 soundtrack for DOAX. You haven't lived until you've seen Hitomi and Li-fang in matching cheerleader uniforms playing volleyball against Lisa and Tina with the music of Yoko Kanno playing in the background.... um... or so I've heard.
Dude, if you think the X-Box controller, even the big meaty original one, is in any way "heavy", you really need to stop playing the PS2 and get some exercise. Little girls can probably beat you senseless right now.
"Shuffle Songs" is the name of the setting which lets you shuffle whichever playlist you select. If you browse to the "Shuffle" line in the "Settings" menu, you will see that the three settings for it are "Off", "Album" and... drum roll, please... "Songs!" Hitting "Shuffle Songs" in the main menu on newer iPods turn on and off the "Songs" mode in the shuffle setting. They are merely adding this feature to the older firmware.
In other words, this is exactly the feature you are asking for. You can relax.
"Think Different" is not meant to say the same thing as "think differently."
They are suggesting you think about the concept of being different, using very casual conversational English to do so.
Sort of like how an interior designer might say "think deco," or a band-leader asking a soloist to mimic the bebop style a little more might say "think Bird."
You are too tied up in traditional ways of getting a message across and overlooking the simple poetry of a two-word marketing campaign. You could stand to take some of their advice. Think Different.
Re:One thing the editor left off..
on
Apple Updates iPod
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You could always mount a shuffle, with the neck lanyard, inside a big clock. You know, Public Enemy style.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... criticising Russian mafia... better post Anonymously...
D'oh!
No kidding.
Look, Slashbots, if you want to spend your money supporting Russian crime syndicates, that's just great. Please post you home address so somebody who lost his kneecaps over this site knows where to get a new pair.
Hmm... criticising Russian mafia... better post Anonymously...
Anyway, swerving back on topic, the part of the article that caught my eye was this:
One suggestion is that labels want to introduce variable pricing - so they can charge more for top selling tracks.
You know what? I'm all for it... if it means they are willing to discount the less-popular stuff in exchange. Then people who want to pay four bucks a song for the latest "boy band" can do so, and I can get all my favorite fucked-up indie stuff on the cheap. It's win-win!
This week, I set foot in a record store for the first time in months. New CD's cost more than a lot of film DVD's now! Eighteen bucks!? For last year's Liz Phair album!? I don't think so. When I think about the fact that I was in a "budget" warehouse, I shudder to think what the mall stores are charging. Even the used CD's at this join were occasionally as high as twelve dollars each... Making the iTunes Music Store the cheapest way in town for me to get some albums. (Well... apart from supporting organized crime families, anyway.) I'm not at all surprised the labels want to haggle for a better deal.
They bit all these black american blues artists. All they did was popularize it.
Totally disagree. Lennon & McCarntey owe at least as much to Rogers and Hammerstein as they do to Elmore James. Also, the close-harmony singing of their early albums certainly did not come from the blues. It came from their own local music.
Everything came from somewhere, but the Beatles at least built upon their influences to create things the world never heard before. Even their sound guys were doing things in radically new ways.
Example: McCartney really liked the "big" bass sound on Phil Specter records, and wanted a heavier sound from his bass. The engineers at abbey road took two huge woofer cabinets, and wired one of them as the microphone to record the bass signal coming from other. The result is the mind-blowing (almost underwater-like) bass sound you hear on many of the later Beatles recordings.
Your comments reveal that you simply miss the point.
The appeal of anime is a direct result of the fact that it's cheap to make. The low cost means it is a low-risk investment, which means that an Anime creator has far fewer studio pressures than somebody making a US movie or TV show.
Like I said in another comment, "Haibane Renmei" could never be made for US television. Not because there's nobody writing for TV who's as smart as ABe, but because no TV writer or director has the power to realize a vision which is so unique and fails to fit into any easy-to-sell "genre."
The same is true of "Kino's Journey," a show which is a hybrid of a road buddy picture, and a smarter, more spiritual "Twilight Zone."
If you can't follow the plots of such shows, I would not suggest bragging about it.
Is 99% of anime as good as the stuff I just mentioned? No. Then again, neither is 99.999% of US media.
Anime is considered by most of the world, and Hollywood in particular as nonconventional, and thus not to be taken into consideration.
It's too bad, because the fact that it's "nonconvetional" is the best thing about it.
There will probably never be a TV show in the US quite like "Haibane Renmei."
"Azumanga Diaoh" is the best comic fiction about kids since "Peanuts" was in its prime, with the possible exception of "Calvin & Hobbes."
"Last Exile" is exactly what Lucas probably wishes his Prequel trilogy could be, if he were only a better writer/director.
is it me or is The Incredibles incredibly overrated, compared to Shrek 1/2 and Toy Story 1/2?
It's you.
The Incredibles was an amazing movie, while the other four films you mentioned were merely darn good cartoons.
Speaking of Animated action, the combat and flight sequences in "Last Exile" are second to none, IMHO.
No, Jon Katz was sinserely wrong. He watched Buffy reruns and thought he understood modern teens, read Kevin Mitnick interviews in 2600 and thought he understood hacker culture, read Slashdot comments and thought they were a representative sample of American geeks. I think he was genuinely surprised at how detested some of his rambling became around here.
Dvorak, on the other hand, knows better. He knows that if he calls the iBook 300 "girly" or says that Linux-on-Windows will put Red Hat, Debian, and Gentoo out of business, people will rush to the web site to read his rubbish, and then comment on it it forums, link to it on blogs and slash sites, and go to great lengths to alert the world about how wrong he is... all of which gets his site hits, and makes his publisher very happy with him. He's laughing all the way to the bank, because his goal is not to be seen as insightful, but simply to be seen.
Does anybody still take a word that says seriously anymore? All he ever does is troll for ad hits by saying something which will piss off one fringe group of computer geeks or another.
Honestly. Why ever link to that joker?
My local PBS station provides more interesting information and culture in a week of programs than I get from a year's subscription to The Atlantic Monthly.
Most of TV is banal amusement, sure, but there have been many shows which feature far better writing and acting than can be found anywhere in my local theater district. The best example among the current crop of shows is probably "Lost."
Keep in mind that if you held Picasso to the same artistic standards as his predecessors, he would be useless trash too...
I beg to differ
Picasso did abstract work most of the time because he chose to, not because he couldn't do realistic portrats.
Nothing by Ayn Rand belongs in a library, unless the library happens to have public toilets.
Any writer hated that strongly by a small group of angry critics belongs in every library in America. She might be wrong, but she certainly provokes discussion and critical thinking.
If there wasn't an Ayn Rand to spell out exactly what objectivism is, I would not know that I'm not an objectivist.
Any library which does not have both "Catcher in the Rye" and "Mein Kampf" might as well be turned into a Wal-Mart.
Plus, the problem with Franklin (God love him) is that he almost never produced an original thought. He just paraphrased the philosophies of revolutionary French thinkers.
Even most of the "penny saved is a penny earned" crap from his Almanac, which he still frequently gets credit for coming up with, are old sayings he picked up from the French and simply translated into English.
People who really want to understand the seeds of Democracy and freedom in the US will generally read Voltaire and Toqueville, not Ben Franklin.
Indeed. It takes a great deal of skill for a performer to press down the keys of the keyboard without making a sound. If a single note escapes the piano, you have played the piece improperly. If you press the wrong key, you have played the piece improperly (though it's hard to imagine how a large audience could tell this).
When played CORRECTLY, Cage's work is a masterpiece. When the pianist sits silent for 273 seconds, it's just silly.
You could not be more wrong.
Miming that you are playing an instrument is 100% the wrong way to perform 4'33". It is a "chance music" composition which is supposed to be entirely about the environmental sounds. Any choreographed distractions on the part of the performer completely distract from what the piece is supposed to be.
As with any dispute of fact, it's Google to the rescue:
So there you go. No notes. The process of composition being described as "note for note" was just Cage's overcompensation due to his worry about his work being taken as a joke if he did not go out of his way to put effort into creating it.
Actually, according to what the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) said in 1997, the most popular jukebox selection of all time is Patsy Cline's recording of "Crazy."
It's a cute story though. I could see why you would want it to be true.
IIRC, there were no "notes" involved. Simply a time signature, a tempo, and a set number of tacet measures.
Also, closing the piano case between movements is just showmanship. It's not part of the composition, although it was an important part of his performance of it. The piece has been "transcribed" for French Horn and various other instruments over the years.
FedEx is a verb now, too... but both UPS and USPS manage to "fedex" a hell of a lot more packages every year.
Brand ubiquity is not the same thing as brand loyalty.
You do realize that Vice Presidents everywhere now know they can have their CEO killed simply by suing you, saving the trouble of a boardroom coup.
Also building your own MP3 soundtrack for DOAX. You haven't lived until you've seen Hitomi and Li-fang in matching cheerleader uniforms playing volleyball against Lisa and Tina with the music of Yoko Kanno playing in the background. ... um... or so I've heard.
Dude, if you think the X-Box controller, even the big meaty original one, is in any way "heavy", you really need to stop playing the PS2 and get some exercise. Little girls can probably beat you senseless right now.
Perhaps I am mistaken. I know people with the newer one, but I have the older one. I'll have to download the firmware update tonight and find out.
Thank you, oh great and final arbiter of all that is and is not Slashdot, User 668092.
Go read the FAQ for this site and come back when you are done. Until then, STFU.
Ummm...
"Shuffle Songs" is the name of the setting which lets you shuffle whichever playlist you select. If you browse to the "Shuffle" line in the "Settings" menu, you will see that the three settings for it are "Off", "Album" and... drum roll, please... "Songs!" Hitting "Shuffle Songs" in the main menu on newer iPods turn on and off the "Songs" mode in the shuffle setting. They are merely adding this feature to the older firmware.
In other words, this is exactly the feature you are asking for. You can relax.
"Think Different" is not meant to say the same thing as "think differently."
They are suggesting you think about the concept of being different, using very casual conversational English to do so.
Sort of like how an interior designer might say "think deco," or a band-leader asking a soloist to mimic the bebop style a little more might say "think Bird."
You are too tied up in traditional ways of getting a message across and overlooking the simple poetry of a two-word marketing campaign. You could stand to take some of their advice. Think Different.
You could always mount a shuffle, with the neck lanyard, inside a big clock. You know, Public Enemy style.
Fight da powah!