I think that most reasonable adults would read "Scrabulous" as meaning "Scrabble(TM)-like, but not Scrabble(TM)"
Does that not still indicate an intent to associate the product in people's minds with Scrabble[TM]? Using the ever-popular car analogy, would it be alright for an upstart auto manufacturer to brand their product as the "Tayota Camrite"? After all, it's Toyota Camry[TM]-like, but not Toyota Camry[TM]... right?
If they had called their Facebook application "Crossword Tiles", Hasbro wouldn't be able to touch them. They also wouldn't have been able to collect valuable account information from the millions of players who added the application because they like Scrabble.
Trotting out a machine that is litteraly obsolete* as a case study proves nothing other than that Vista doesn't play nice on old hardware.
If you have to specify the definition of "obsolete" that you're using, perhaps it's not the most cromulent term to use.
Yes, up until very recently a 5-year-old piece of desktop kit would have been considered obsolete, in every sense. But today, we're at a point where that "ancient" Pentium IV with 512MB of RAM is (or should be) all the processing power the typical web surfer or spreadsheet jockey normally needs.
Hardware manufacturers' desire to keep selling more new products doesn't mean that all prior products have become functionally obsolete.
Looks like that it is time for all browsers, in particular, IE, to seriously consider supporting standards-based vector graphics.
Right. How could Microsoft, a company with 90,000 employees and a market cap of over $250 Billion, possibly fail to respond to the desires of a hundred customers who spent a grand total of $0.00 on Internet Explorer?
The best way of doing that now is with the Hydra console. The hardware is completely documented and described at the beginner level in the book. And there is no OS or APIs to deal with, disguising what's really going on. You code straight to the bare metal.
What are the benefits of the Hydra -- which has no presence anywhere except as a learning aid, as far as I can tell -- over doing homebrew development for an actual gaming console? Useful development tools exist for every console from the Atari 2600 through the Nintendo DS.
Seriously....I look in the paper and it's filled with ads for drivers. That and health care professionals. And as I would rather stick a pencil in my eye than work in health care, I figure my misanthropic ways would be better shifted toward driving.
You're an IT professional, and you're looking for employment opportunities in THE NEWSPAPER...?
During the last few years I have went with Intel because they have the better products now. If AMD wants my future business, they need to come out with something that beats what Intel has.
Are Intel products significantly better than AMD products, or just marginally?
If AMD goes out of business and Intel is left as the sole x86 provider, you can look forward to another round of market-blind dead-end technologies like Itanium and RAMBUS.
Well that's that. Usenet is dead. I am glad that child predators won't have any [www.giganews.com] other [www.usenet.com] way [www.usenet.net] to access the cesspool of child pornography that is Usenet.
You do realize that the natural next step, after ISPs shutting down their own NNTP servers to "protect the children", is for them to block commercial Usenet services at the routers, right?
The PS3 is still a worthwhile investment. It is the only next-generation console with a BluRay drive, and therefore the only console with the capacity to hold the 90 hours of cutscenes that will be in the next Metal Gear Solid game...!
Oddly enough the screenshot feature of Mac OS X is disabled when you are playing a DVD. I'd take a screenshot of the error message, but I obviously can't.
The most likely reason for this is that the DVD output is implemented as an overlay within the video system, and the framebuffer that screenshots are grabbed from does not include that overlay.
The first DVD playback device I owned -- a Creative DVD-ROM drive with a dedicated decoder card -- actually had an external passthrough that the VGA cable had to go through, as it was not practical to composite the decoded MPEG video onto the rest of the desktop in software at that time.
Maintaining the rights allow companies to do things like charge you ten dollars to play the original Super Mario Brothers on your Wii.
*sigh*
A Virtual Console download of "Super Mario Brothers" is 500 points, or $5.00 USD.
Is that still a little steep for a copy of 32KB of 6502-ish machine code, first released to the public over 22 years ago? That's debatable. But exaggeration is unbecoming of you.
Start making a stink about that fact that these companies violated the law, violated our rights, and now after the fact are looking to get a deal for it.
No, I have more important things to do, like making a stink about the fact that THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION violated the law, violated our rights, and persuaded (under color of fraudulent authority) certain private industries to go along with them.
Let's not worry about the accomplices getting what they deserve for their acts until the ringleaders have first been made to face the music.
A lot of time those licensing costs for pop songs are way more expensive than hiring a composer and an orchestra for few days (although EA has its own music label), so I don't think its a cost-cutting measure. (And hell, if you want an electronic soundtrack, you could probably hire an in house composer for salary and have them just crank out tunes for a bunch of games at once).
Hey game companies, if you're hiring I'm available. My musical and technological credentials are solid, and I have a portfolio available for review upon request. NYC area only, please.
The thing is, "original soundtrack composed by Poot Rootbeer" on the game box isn't going to sell any extra copies, and that's true for just about every experienced game composer who isn't named K. Kondo, N. Uematsu, H. Tanaka, or Y. Koshiro. "Featuring songs by Kid Rock, 50 Cent, and Carrie Underwood," unfortunately, actually will result in increased sales.
Original creative work is jettisoned to make room in the budget for the safe and the familiar.
Come to think of it, that's a succinct summary of the EA-style approach to game publishing, right there.
He compares video games with the military's conditioning.
Of course, when you join the military, the conditioning you are subjected to is compulsory. With a video game, the player -- or the player's parent -- can flip the power switch at any time.
You cannot apply fair use to something that has never been copyrighted. Claiming that a song is copyrighted, and therefore any tablature is copyrighted is absurd.
Only if you don't understand how the copyright system works. (Many people do not, which may suggest that the system is poor.)
As soon as a creative work, such as a song, it brought into existence, it is subject to copyright. The creator gets to decide who may make copies of the work, including printed musical notation that represents the content of the work.
In short, the right to publish tablature for a song is reserved to the creator of the song and/or those to whom a license to copy has been assigned.
First of all, you would have to charge almost every band that ever existed with copyright violation, since 99% of the live band music played on any given day is what we musicians call a cover song.
You've changed the subject. I thought we were talking about publication, not performance.
unless the tablature has been written down then your putting it on paper (or computer screen) is a new work.
Can someone help alleviate my ignorance here?
Surely a transcription of music from a phonorecording to a tablature sheet is not a new work, but a derivative one? It is the content, not the medium, which matters.
If someone is good at something, ferchrissake KEEP THEM THERE!
For the short term, yes, obviously. But be careful not to pigeonhole your developers.
Your most skilled and most motivated employees want to always be picking up new skills and cultivating new knowledge. If you have them working on the same thing, month after month, year after year, they're going to get bored and restless. Better to reassign them to another project within the company before they reach that point than to lose them entirely to another employer.
This, in fact, may be a useful argument against homogenization of toolsets. Even though the amount of code that can be written within a single language, say Java, is immense, The Enthusiastic Coder will eventually tire of writing endless indistinguishable class definitions and accessor methods. Maybe exploring Ruby on Rails instead in the next project will keep him energized, if it's a good match for the business needs?
I know that in early church music it wasn't used much because there was for many centuries an emphasis away from flamboyancy. Even the use of musical instruments (including the organ) was, for a long time, shunned.
Well, that's what was happening in the churches back then. We know about it due to the relatively high level of literacy amongst the brotherhood at the time.
What we don't know much about is what was happening outside of the churches. It's not, despite what the modern 'Early Music' curriculum might lead one to believe, as if music was invented out of whole cloth in AD 700, with the idea to sound one note against a different one not being conceived until a couple centuries later.
Some things vibrato is not: -Tremolo: the repetition of a note, usually rapid, despite the misuse of the term in electric guitar circles to mean pitch-bending equipment.
It surprises me that in a comment so thorough and well-presented as yours that you would miss the mark on the relevant definition of 'tremolo'.
In acoustics terms, tremolo is a cyclic departure from and return to an intensity. It is similar to vibrato, only occurring on the amplitude-axis rather than the frequency-axis, and the two are generally used for similar expressive effect.
The technique of rapid repetition of a note that you cite is more accurately called 'tremolando', and could be reasonably viewed as an attempt to create the amplitude fluctuation effect on instruments which cannot increase the intensity of a note without re-striking it.
'Is [the Web] still the Web if you can't navigate directly to specific content? Is it still the Web if the content can't be indexed and searched? Is it still the Web if you can only view the application on certain clients or devices? Is it still the Web if you can't view source?
I remember the EXACT same questions being posed TEN YEARS ago, when the big trend in web development was to litter a site with Java applets.
The web stayed web-y through that fad, and it's stayed web-y through Flash (which has been around just as long), and it will stay web-y through AJAX and WUB and MRUEQ and whatever happens next to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that most reasonable adults would read "Scrabulous" as meaning "Scrabble(TM)-like, but not Scrabble(TM)"
Does that not still indicate an intent to associate the product in people's minds with Scrabble[TM]? Using the ever-popular car analogy, would it be alright for an upstart auto manufacturer to brand their product as the "Tayota Camrite"? After all, it's Toyota Camry[TM]-like, but not Toyota Camry[TM]... right?
If they had called their Facebook application "Crossword Tiles", Hasbro wouldn't be able to touch them. They also wouldn't have been able to collect valuable account information from the millions of players who added the application because they like Scrabble.
I give a talk on the consequences of Moore's Law to a freshman class every year, and one of my topics is autonomous vehicles.
Do you give a talk on the consequences of Murphy's Law as well?
Do you think XP, OSX, and for that matter, Linux, are generally "optimized for SSDs"?
No, but I don't think they're as openly hostile to permanent storage not based on Winchester drive technology, either.
Trotting out a machine that is litteraly obsolete* as a case study proves nothing other than that Vista doesn't play nice on old hardware.
If you have to specify the definition of "obsolete" that you're using, perhaps it's not the most cromulent term to use.
Yes, up until very recently a 5-year-old piece of desktop kit would have been considered obsolete, in every sense. But today, we're at a point where that "ancient" Pentium IV with 512MB of RAM is (or should be) all the processing power the typical web surfer or spreadsheet jockey normally needs.
Hardware manufacturers' desire to keep selling more new products doesn't mean that all prior products have become functionally obsolete.
Looks like that it is time for all browsers, in particular, IE, to seriously consider supporting standards-based vector graphics.
Right. How could Microsoft, a company with 90,000 employees and a market cap of over $250 Billion, possibly fail to respond to the desires of a hundred customers who spent a grand total of $0.00 on Internet Explorer?
The best way of doing that now is with the Hydra console. The hardware is completely documented and described at the beginner level in the book. And there is no OS or APIs to deal with, disguising what's really going on. You code straight to the bare metal.
What are the benefits of the Hydra -- which has no presence anywhere except as a learning aid, as far as I can tell -- over doing homebrew development for an actual gaming console? Useful development tools exist for every console from the Atari 2600 through the Nintendo DS.
Seriously....I look in the paper and it's filled with ads for drivers. That and health care professionals. And as I would rather stick a pencil in my eye than work in health care, I figure my misanthropic ways would be better shifted toward driving.
You're an IT professional, and you're looking for employment opportunities in THE NEWSPAPER...?
During the last few years I have went with Intel because they have the better products now. If AMD wants my future business, they need to come out with something that beats what Intel has.
Are Intel products significantly better than AMD products, or just marginally?
If AMD goes out of business and Intel is left as the sole x86 provider, you can look forward to another round of market-blind dead-end technologies like Itanium and RAMBUS.
You know, not everyone has non-production servers. Every server we have IS production.
Well, there's your problem right there...
Well that's that. Usenet is dead. I am glad that child predators won't have any [www.giganews.com] other [www.usenet.com] way [www.usenet.net] to access the cesspool of child pornography that is Usenet.
You do realize that the natural next step, after ISPs shutting down their own NNTP servers to "protect the children", is for them to block commercial Usenet services at the routers, right?
If a company is done with a product, consumers do not have a right to force them to keep supplying it.
Reasonable companies normally don't decide they are "done with" products for which there is still high consumer demand.
Cheer up, CmdrTaco!
The PS3 is still a worthwhile investment. It is the only next-generation console with a BluRay drive, and therefore the only console with the capacity to hold the 90 hours of cutscenes that will be in the next Metal Gear Solid game...!
Reminds me of letting Col. Clink check on the prisoners. Letting the OS "integrity check" itself is an amusing thought and a very, very bad idea.
I'd be curious to find out how you think operating systems bootstrap themselves currently.
Oddly enough the screenshot feature of Mac OS X is disabled when you are playing a DVD. I'd take a screenshot of the error message, but I obviously can't.
The most likely reason for this is that the DVD output is implemented as an overlay within the video system, and the framebuffer that screenshots are grabbed from does not include that overlay.
The first DVD playback device I owned -- a Creative DVD-ROM drive with a dedicated decoder card -- actually had an external passthrough that the VGA cable had to go through, as it was not practical to composite the decoded MPEG video onto the rest of the desktop in software at that time.
Maintaining the rights allow companies to do things like charge you ten dollars to play the original Super Mario Brothers on your Wii.
*sigh*
A Virtual Console download of "Super Mario Brothers" is 500 points, or $5.00 USD.
Is that still a little steep for a copy of 32KB of 6502-ish machine code, first released to the public over 22 years ago? That's debatable. But exaggeration is unbecoming of you.
Start making a stink about that fact that these companies violated the law, violated our rights, and now after the fact are looking to get a deal for it.
No, I have more important things to do, like making a stink about the fact that THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION violated the law, violated our rights, and persuaded (under color of fraudulent authority) certain private industries to go along with them.
Let's not worry about the accomplices getting what they deserve for their acts until the ringleaders have first been made to face the music.
A lot of time those licensing costs for pop songs are way more expensive than hiring a composer and an orchestra for few days (although EA has its own music label), so I don't think its a cost-cutting measure. (And hell, if you want an electronic soundtrack, you could probably hire an in house composer for salary and have them just crank out tunes for a bunch of games at once).
Hey game companies, if you're hiring I'm available. My musical and technological credentials are solid, and I have a portfolio available for review upon request. NYC area only, please.
The thing is, "original soundtrack composed by Poot Rootbeer" on the game box isn't going to sell any extra copies, and that's true for just about every experienced game composer who isn't named K. Kondo, N. Uematsu, H. Tanaka, or Y. Koshiro. "Featuring songs by Kid Rock, 50 Cent, and Carrie Underwood," unfortunately, actually will result in increased sales.
Original creative work is jettisoned to make room in the budget for the safe and the familiar.
Come to think of it, that's a succinct summary of the EA-style approach to game publishing, right there.
He compares video games with the military's conditioning.
Of course, when you join the military, the conditioning you are subjected to is compulsory. With a video game, the player -- or the player's parent -- can flip the power switch at any time.
You cannot apply fair use to something that has never been copyrighted. Claiming that a song is copyrighted, and therefore any tablature is copyrighted is absurd.
Only if you don't understand how the copyright system works. (Many people do not, which may suggest that the system is poor.)
As soon as a creative work, such as a song, it brought into existence, it is subject to copyright. The creator gets to decide who may make copies of the work, including printed musical notation that represents the content of the work.
In short, the right to publish tablature for a song is reserved to the creator of the song and/or those to whom a license to copy has been assigned.
First of all, you would have to charge almost every band that ever existed with copyright violation, since 99% of the live band music played on any given day is what we musicians call a cover song .
You've changed the subject. I thought we were talking about publication, not performance.
unless the tablature has been written down then your putting it on paper (or computer screen) is a new work.
Can someone help alleviate my ignorance here?
Surely a transcription of music from a phonorecording to a tablature sheet is not a new work, but a derivative one? It is the content, not the medium, which matters.
If someone is good at something, ferchrissake KEEP THEM THERE!
For the short term, yes, obviously. But be careful not to pigeonhole your developers.
Your most skilled and most motivated employees want to always be picking up new skills and cultivating new knowledge. If you have them working on the same thing, month after month, year after year, they're going to get bored and restless. Better to reassign them to another project within the company before they reach that point than to lose them entirely to another employer.
This, in fact, may be a useful argument against homogenization of toolsets. Even though the amount of code that can be written within a single language, say Java, is immense, The Enthusiastic Coder will eventually tire of writing endless indistinguishable class definitions and accessor methods. Maybe exploring Ruby on Rails instead in the next project will keep him energized, if it's a good match for the business needs?
I know that in early church music it wasn't used much because there was for many centuries an emphasis away from flamboyancy. Even the use of musical instruments (including the organ) was, for a long time, shunned.
Well, that's what was happening in the churches back then. We know about it due to the relatively high level of literacy amongst the brotherhood at the time.
What we don't know much about is what was happening outside of the churches. It's not, despite what the modern 'Early Music' curriculum might lead one to believe, as if music was invented out of whole cloth in AD 700, with the idea to sound one note against a different one not being conceived until a couple centuries later.
Yeah, but Shakira makes up in lack of singing talent with huge... tracts of land.
Are you mistaking them for mountains? Last I checked, her tracts were small and humble.
Some things vibrato is not:
-Tremolo: the repetition of a note, usually rapid, despite the misuse of the term in electric guitar circles to mean pitch-bending equipment.
It surprises me that in a comment so thorough and well-presented as yours that you would miss the mark on the relevant definition of 'tremolo'.
In acoustics terms, tremolo is a cyclic departure from and return to an intensity. It is similar to vibrato, only occurring on the amplitude-axis rather than the frequency-axis, and the two are generally used for similar expressive effect.
The technique of rapid repetition of a note that you cite is more accurately called 'tremolando', and could be reasonably viewed as an attempt to create the amplitude fluctuation effect on instruments which cannot increase the intensity of a note without re-striking it.
'Is [the Web] still the Web if you can't navigate directly to specific content? Is it still the Web if the content can't be indexed and searched? Is it still the Web if you can only view the application on certain clients or devices? Is it still the Web if you can't view source?
I remember the EXACT same questions being posed TEN YEARS ago, when the big trend in web development was to litter a site with Java applets.
The web stayed web-y through that fad, and it's stayed web-y through Flash (which has been around just as long), and it will stay web-y through AJAX and WUB and MRUEQ and whatever happens next to it.