Apparently my jab about you having never recorded an orchestra hit a nerve.
Do you even know what a hammered dulcimer and celtic harp are? They are not the latest beat-loop libraries. Please check wikipedia if you're not hip to those instruments.
Attitude...attitude. Anyone can list some instruments and say they recorded them. Doesn't qualify you in any way because who's to say the recordings were any good? Perhaps YOU should
go look up orchestra on Wikipedia to see if celtic harp and hammered dulcimer are equivalent in recording costs. Orchestra
My argument was simply that the original poster's assertion that the actual retail price of an album/song should be directly commensurate to the original recording costs is ridiculous.
Dr_Barnowl's comment hinted at that, but you seemed to miss his main point that classical music royalties go to the performers. And... that the performers well deserved the royalties (what little they got). How can you disagree with that? Especially IF you were in an orchestra? Also, how can you seriously disagree with his point that it costs more to do an excellent recording of of a philharmonic than a single artist? You've been drinking the RIAA punch again haven't you? If the poster feels the retail price should be reflective of how much that recording ACTUALLY cost to pay the artists and recording costs, it's his right. It is not ridiculous and deserving of your diatribe.
More importantly, your attack on me makes as little sense to the original discussion of internet royalty rates as the post I was responding to.
You attacked Dr_Barnowl's comment with an arrogant attitude
(a desire to show off your alleged knowledge of recording costs). You mis-interpreted his comment, and I felt the spirit move within me to call you on it.
As a professional recording engineer and producer with two decades of experience who has worked with not only popular artists like J Lo but also with relatively unknown folk artists playing hammered dulcimer and celtic harp...
I didn't see live orchestra listed anywhere in your resume there. Band-in-a-Box and Reason don't count. There are
some of us that believe that ANY string chair of an orchesta is far more talented ( and desirable to listen to )
than Jennifer Lopez. I suspect you may be a Clear Channel shill.
It would be interesting to see a report with the number of consoles in the field (break it out by commercial and private and windows version) and what percentage belong to a bot network. Wishful thinking since it would be very difficult to do.
For the commercial customers, Microsoft has kept that bread buttered. For the private/home customer, it appears to have been less so. We'll see how Vista fairs with home users.
My parents live a very rural part of Idaho. 22 miles from the nearest town (and by town, I mean one of 700 people. The next closest is 36 miles in the other direction. Albion telephone provides the phone service to the area. I figured he would never see broadband before 2010... and even then it would have to be in some wireless/satellite form. The good folks of Albion telephone spent some serious time putting on and taking off various things in the phone switching boxes in the path to the house. Long story short, they figured out how to get DSL broadband stretched several miles beyond the normal limit. And the cost? Same as if he had been in town. Where he used to be lucky to get a 26.4k connection, it's nearly 500k.
The small companies know how to treat small customers. They know you personally and care. To Verizon/Sprint/AT&T - you're just a number with a dollar sign behind.
they might just up and start paying attention to the world around them, and realize that their government is whittling away their freedoms one by one.
Nah. The masses are becoming less interested in reality all the time. Mortgage foreclosures at an alltime
high, credit card debt completely out of control, spammers continue to make money... on and on. People are just getting too lazy and expect things handed to them. If the welfare folks can't watch their old TVs, they'll take to robbing the HDTVs from those that have them. I'm willing to bet that the amount of time one spends watching television is inversely proportional to one's income. i.e. Those that work hard for a living don't have time (or maybe even the desire) to watch television.
I would think that a company managing 7000+ servers would have an automated patch scheduling system similar to
BMC MarimbaAltiris, or Opsware. You surely don't have time to purchase and install one of these mosters now, but it might be wise to pursue in the future.
There are also some GPL things that may work. Can't think of them right off hand.
If these are *nux desktops/servers, you have plenty of time to write a perl/bash/python to accomplish the task.
Some other slashdot user is going to have to give you advice for a windows environment at this stage of the game
you are in.
They'll be strapping on laptops with Sony batteries
and heading for the Wikipedia office.
p.s. It's a joke, but if you must mod me flamebait... go ahead.
It's too early to discount Oracle/MS/Novell
on
Red Hat Sales Surge
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Those of us that work with the RedHat products will note that not all things are as they seem. Our company feels that we are not getting value for what is paid. Our loaded cost for a Windows machine is cheaper than that for Linux. I'm a die hard linux evangelist, but the numbers don't lie. Linux makes for better servers, and Windows for a better desktop (for now). Redhat changed their licensing for RH8 to RHEL3 right while many corporations were in mid-stream of adopting RedHat Linux. Corporations cannot change course that quickly so all this money RedHat made is from businesses following the corporate plan developed pre RHEL3. Our company adopted RedHat as our Linux standard based on RH8 and the costs at that time. Many company plans and projects began to be based on the use RedHat Linux. RedHat blind-sided us with their licensing change and it didn't make many here very happy. Corporations don't like uncentainty, thus the initial choice of RedHat instead of a less stable distribution. We really don't need the support. It's sort of like a security blanket. There... but really not needed.
We are a large enough company to be nearly self-supporting on Linux issues. Thus the RedHat cost per RHEL3/4 Workstation license is out of line for us. The only feature we need of the RedHat server is multiple CPU and memory capability. We don't use GFS or any of the other stuff. So the $1k server cost is WAY out of line. All the RedHat support we sometimes use are the updated RPMS for the distribution. Yet RedHat seems pretty oblivious to this until recently. We have bought more licenses in the last half year than all previous. Many of our data crunching processes are moving from Windows to Linux (Linux is fast and perl/python work better there.) Yet... we are unhappy with the perceived value. We paid RedHat enough last year that we probably should have just hired Linus to come work for us and gone with Fedora or Whitebox.
My point is this. RedHat is too expensive for what you get. Oracle and MS/Novell smell opportunity and have only begun their campaign. When Oracle comes out with their version of Linux, watch RedHat get completely ejected from corporate use as Oracle database servers (the $1000+/yr cash cow licenses for RedHat). When viable alternatives become available, will we evaluate them? Oh yeah.
If you can afford it, get the Nikon 9000. Sell it when you are done.
I settled on using an Epson 4990 since I wanted the flatbed for other things.
If the difference between a good flatbed and a dedicated film scanner matters to
you, then get the dedicated. The film trays that come with the Epson 4990
work pretty well, but I got a better film carrier from http://www.betterscanning.com/
Takes a lot of the hassle out of curled negatives. Also. If you plan to post process
your scans much, I highly recommend Photoshop with either NeatImage, http://www.neatimage.com/
or Noise Ninja, http://www.picturecode.com/ for removing noise. FocalBlade or FocusMagic,
http://www.focusmagic.com/ has it's place too for some of pictures of interest.
Post processing is going to be key in getting the best results from your scanning effort.
Figure out what you are willing to live with, because it's unrealistic to scan every
negative in at max resolution due to the size of the resulting file.
As mentioned in previous posts, the Digital ICE dust/scratch removal doesn't work on
B&W film. Also Kodachrome color slide film may not work well with certain
scanners when trying to use the auto dust/scratch removal.
B&W presents some challenges. You must scan at 16 bits/channel resolution, otherwise, B&W
results will be too contrasty and lose shadow detail. It sometimes helps to scan as positives
then invert the image in Photoshop. Secondly, flatbed scanners tend to be noisy. This can be
offset by using a multiple-pass option. Four passes work reasonably well without taking a lot
of time. Quite a bit of this noise can be dealt with via NeatImage or Noise Ninja as well.
Since Digital ICE (available on the 4990) does not work with B&W, you will get
a lot of dust. Resist using third-party dust reduction software since it seriously degrades the
image. Just plan to Photoshop images you plan on printing.
If you are wanting to really get down and do some serious negative scanning, quickly
(and cost is not restricting). Get a Creo Eversmart (now owned by Kodak) flatbed scanner.
http://graphics.kodak.com/global/product/scanners/ professional_scanners/default.htm
These are the machines that image archives use when dealing mass volume. It is
impractical to drum scan every slide/negative in an archive, and this is an excellent
compromise.
The main thing is to make sure your negatives keep protected. In another 10-15 years, the
scanning capabilities will be much, much better. However, the people you want to enjoy seeing these
scanned images might be gone! So it's best to use what you can and get the job done. Let the
next generation scan again if they want it done better.
If there is any group that can be called anti-human, anti-science, it is the "true believer" segment of the environmental movement. No other politically active group is so thoroughly terrified of every promising area of research and development, so violent in opposing science (animal rights groups bombing research labs, for example) and so quick to limit the quality of life of the majority of the human race.
Agreed. There's another group that downplays science. I've yet to hear of scientific study of mammals concluding that homosexuality is a natural and acceptable form of procreation. Any truth is inconvenient for those that WISH to believe something different. Time proven scientific truth cannot be explained away. Fact and theory are quite different. For example, facts for evolution or for creation are actually quite hard to come by, but theories based on certain evidence abound. What one side claims as evidence may in time be determined as bogus. Time will tell, and it may take quite a bit of time. Please mod me based on the truth of my statement and not whether you agree with me or not.
How hard would it be to just have an "Advanced Settings" section in Gnome to give the power users the access to functionality they want. And why do we have different locations for menus, icons, etc. It's just nuts. As an admin trying to keep the menus for both Gnome and KDE in sync with the applications installed... it's a full time job. I just want a single location to update menus and icon files in. And would someone please help RedHat and SuSE decide whether/opt/kde and/opt/gnome are going to be used or not. I don't care one way or the other. But please decide. It's a royal pain in the rump trying to admin SuSE and RedHat boxes with the same set of scripts. Royal! There's a reason Linux is having difficulty on the user desktop in larger multi-user environments. KDE and Gnome bear a fair amount of responsibility.
Coporations don't cull 'slackers' they cull people who have unfavorable opinions, were on 'the wrong project', friend of the 'wrong person', or was forced to play a political game.
This is called "Slacker Layoff Denial". Our company went thru a workforce reduction a while back. The people cut were unnecessary. I'm sure most felt they were unduly cut and went into "Slacker Layoff Denial". A company should have that ability. There was a time when blue collar workers were abused, and Asia workers are experiencing some of that abuse. Unions are now past their time in the U.S. and mostly protect unnecessary jobs. Classic example: Why did it take so long for trains to lose the unnecessary caboose? Unions. Where else can a guy get paid $50k+ to do nothing but drive cars off the assembly line and park them? The U.S.! What kind of skill does that take? It's complete utter garbage that a worker should expect to make 2x a teacher's salary for doing a job with a skillset equivalent to lawn mowing. There are few underpaid folks in the US based on their skillset and responsibilities. K-12 teachers are all I can think of off hand (no I'm not a teacher). If someone doesn't want to run a shovel and hammer, then they should educate themselves. This is the United States of America. Education. The only one holding anyone back is themselves. Education. Mod me down. Education. Doesn't change the fact of the matter. Education. BTW, it pleases me to live in a Right-to-work state.
Can't you find another city in the U.S. to make fun of...
Jokes must play off stereotypes, or else they fail to draw laughter.
You know, Montana is little tired of sheep jokes. Florida is tired of chad/ballot/dumb voter jokes. Roll with the punches and laugh. It was a well timed and placed pun.
It's just classic that in this discussion about congressional abuse of Wikipedia, that we have a link to.... a Wikipedia entry of a senator. Now supposedly he's dead, but am I able to trust this? There's no picture of a death certificate. How much time should pass before an entry for a political figure on Wikipedia can be trusted? Must they be dead? At what point does political spin stop and historical accuracy begin? Inquiring minds want to know.
Sony's got to cut back to the bone to survive because you piratical sons-of-bitches aren't buying enough Ricky Martin CDs!!
They didn't even threaten first. "The dog dies if you don't buy CD's..."
At least Sony could have tried the "Save Toby" ploy first. http://www.savetoby.com/
I'm thinking that color changing cosmetics could change things quite a bit.
Phrases like, "That chick really looks hot!" could take on a totally new meaning.
Women going into menopause would have to avoid these cosmetics. Otherwise they
might have an embarrassing "strobe" effect.
This is why reform is needed for class-action lawyer fees. The lawyers need to get a percentage of the actual money the class-action lawsuit participants get. If the lawyers negotiate some crap deal where the class-action results in coupons to the participants, the lawyers should only get fees based on the percentage of coupons used or redeemed. Also, class action should be reserved for egregious acts by corporations with disregard for the safety or health of the public. If a class action suit can be shown to be lawyer greed, it should be tossed. Sorry, got my hackles up a bit... I feel better now.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony just has to get the word out that you can't put Blu-ray disks in regular ol' DVD players.
It would be interesting to see a report with the number of consoles in the field (break it out by commercial and private and windows version) and what percentage belong to a bot network. Wishful thinking since it would be very difficult to do.
For the commercial customers, Microsoft has kept that bread buttered. For the private/home customer, it appears to have been less so. We'll see how Vista fairs with home users.
My parents live a very rural part of Idaho. 22 miles from the nearest town (and by town, I mean one of 700 people. The next closest is 36 miles in the other direction. Albion telephone provides the phone service to the area. I figured he would never see broadband before 2010... and even then it would have to be in some wireless/satellite form. The good folks of Albion telephone spent some serious time putting on and taking off various things in the phone switching boxes in the path to the house. Long story short, they figured out how to get DSL broadband stretched several miles beyond the normal limit. And the cost? Same as if he had been in town. Where he used to be lucky to get a 26.4k connection, it's nearly 500k.
The small companies know how to treat small customers. They know you personally and care. To Verizon/Sprint/AT&T - you're just a number with a dollar sign behind.
I would think that a company managing 7000+ servers would have an automated patch scheduling system similar to BMC Marimba Altiris, or Opsware. You surely don't have time to purchase and install one of these mosters now, but it might be wise to pursue in the future.
There are also some GPL things that may work. Can't think of them right off hand. If these are *nux desktops/servers, you have plenty of time to write a perl/bash/python to accomplish the task. Some other slashdot user is going to have to give you advice for a windows environment at this stage of the game you are in.
They'll be strapping on laptops with Sony batteries and heading for the Wikipedia office. p.s. It's a joke, but if you must mod me flamebait... go ahead.
Those of us that work with the RedHat products will note that not all things are as they seem. Our company feels that we are not getting value for what is paid. Our loaded cost for a Windows machine is cheaper than that for Linux. I'm a die hard linux evangelist, but the numbers don't lie. Linux makes for better servers, and Windows for a better desktop (for now). Redhat changed their licensing for RH8 to RHEL3 right while many corporations were in mid-stream of adopting RedHat Linux. Corporations cannot change course that quickly so all this money RedHat made is from businesses following the corporate plan developed pre RHEL3. Our company adopted RedHat as our Linux standard based on RH8 and the costs at that time. Many company plans and projects began to be based on the use RedHat Linux. RedHat blind-sided us with their licensing change and it didn't make many here very happy. Corporations don't like uncentainty, thus the initial choice of RedHat instead of a less stable distribution. We really don't need the support. It's sort of like a security blanket. There... but really not needed.
We are a large enough company to be nearly self-supporting on Linux issues. Thus the RedHat cost per RHEL3/4 Workstation license is out of line for us. The only feature we need of the RedHat server is multiple CPU and memory capability. We don't use GFS or any of the other stuff. So the $1k server cost is WAY out of line. All the RedHat support we sometimes use are the updated RPMS for the distribution. Yet RedHat seems pretty oblivious to this until recently. We have bought more licenses in the last half year than all previous. Many of our data crunching processes are moving from Windows to Linux (Linux is fast and perl/python work better there.) Yet... we are unhappy with the perceived value. We paid RedHat enough last year that we probably should have just hired Linus to come work for us and gone with Fedora or Whitebox.
My point is this. RedHat is too expensive for what you get. Oracle and MS/Novell smell opportunity and have only begun their campaign. When Oracle comes out with their version of Linux, watch RedHat get completely ejected from corporate use as Oracle database servers (the $1000+/yr cash cow licenses for RedHat). When viable alternatives become available, will we evaluate them? Oh yeah.
If you can afford it, get the Nikon 9000. Sell it when you are done. I settled on using an Epson 4990 since I wanted the flatbed for other things. If the difference between a good flatbed and a dedicated film scanner matters to you, then get the dedicated. The film trays that come with the Epson 4990 work pretty well, but I got a better film carrier from http://www.betterscanning.com/ Takes a lot of the hassle out of curled negatives. Also. If you plan to post process your scans much, I highly recommend Photoshop with either NeatImage, http://www.neatimage.com/ or Noise Ninja, http://www.picturecode.com/ for removing noise. FocalBlade or FocusMagic, http://www.focusmagic.com/ has it's place too for some of pictures of interest. Post processing is going to be key in getting the best results from your scanning effort. Figure out what you are willing to live with, because it's unrealistic to scan every negative in at max resolution due to the size of the resulting file.
/ professional_scanners/default.htm
These are the machines that image archives use when dealing mass volume. It is
impractical to drum scan every slide/negative in an archive, and this is an excellent
compromise.
As mentioned in previous posts, the Digital ICE dust/scratch removal doesn't work on B&W film. Also Kodachrome color slide film may not work well with certain scanners when trying to use the auto dust/scratch removal.
B&W presents some challenges. You must scan at 16 bits/channel resolution, otherwise, B&W results will be too contrasty and lose shadow detail. It sometimes helps to scan as positives then invert the image in Photoshop. Secondly, flatbed scanners tend to be noisy. This can be offset by using a multiple-pass option. Four passes work reasonably well without taking a lot of time. Quite a bit of this noise can be dealt with via NeatImage or Noise Ninja as well. Since Digital ICE (available on the 4990) does not work with B&W, you will get a lot of dust. Resist using third-party dust reduction software since it seriously degrades the image. Just plan to Photoshop images you plan on printing.
If you are wanting to really get down and do some serious negative scanning, quickly (and cost is not restricting). Get a Creo Eversmart (now owned by Kodak) flatbed scanner. http://graphics.kodak.com/global/product/scanners
The main thing is to make sure your negatives keep protected. In another 10-15 years, the scanning capabilities will be much, much better. However, the people you want to enjoy seeing these scanned images might be gone! So it's best to use what you can and get the job done. Let the next generation scan again if they want it done better.
Joke aside, I totally agree with your post.
Never even got nominated. Next year I'll demand the users nominate me, or I'll erase their files.
Reiserfs has a unique algorithm that can find the 'kill' file quicker than xfs, ext2, or ext3.
How hard would it be to just have an "Advanced Settings" section in Gnome to give the power users the access to functionality they want. And why do we have different locations for menus, icons, etc. It's just nuts. As an admin trying to keep the menus for both Gnome and KDE in sync with the applications installed... it's a full time job. I just want a single location to update menus and icon files in. And would someone please help RedHat and SuSE decide whether /opt/kde and /opt/gnome are going to be used or not. I don't care one way or the other. But please decide. It's a royal pain in the rump trying to admin SuSE and RedHat boxes with the same set of scripts. Royal! There's a reason Linux is having difficulty on the user desktop in larger multi-user environments. KDE and Gnome bear a fair amount of responsibility.
That does it. I'm going to have to convert CD's to reel-to-reel and then have vinyl masters made. I'm sure they'll sound "warmer" to boot.
At least Sony could have tried the "Save Toby" ploy first. http://www.savetoby.com/
That'll learn ya to do that.
Dude. Wish I had mod points...
I'm thinking that color changing cosmetics could change things quite a bit.
Phrases like, "That chick really looks hot!" could take on a totally new meaning.
Women going into menopause would have to avoid these cosmetics. Otherwise they
might have an embarrassing "strobe" effect.
This is why reform is needed for class-action lawyer fees. The lawyers need to get a percentage of the actual money the class-action lawsuit participants get. If the lawyers negotiate some crap deal where the class-action results in coupons to the participants, the lawyers should only get fees based on the percentage of coupons used or redeemed. Also, class action should be reserved for egregious acts by corporations with disregard for the safety or health of the public. If a class action suit can be shown to be lawyer greed, it should be tossed. Sorry, got my hackles up a bit... I feel better now.