This is not sheet music, because it doesn't include the instrument-indepent staff.
It IS sheet music, because essential melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic aspects of the music can be derived from the tablature. That, to me, satisfies all the identity requirements of "sheet music". It's not just a term that applies to musical notation consisting of five lines, four spaces, and a G-clef.
If the interpretation bears a resemblance to the original work, then it is a derivative work. And if it is a derivative work, then it is subject to copyright law. And if it is subject to copyright law, then the creator has a limited right to control distribution of his/her work and its derivatives.
What it actually is is reverse-engineering. Whether we have the same legal right to distribute reverse-engineered music as we do to distribute reverse-engineered computer code is a question I am not prepared to debate.
What is the ideal solution to the OLGA situation? Artists should sell their own official lyric books/sheet music/tablature. There's clearly a market for it, and with internet distribution and and army of starving former Music majors out there looking for transcription work, it should cost them next to nothing.
It's nice that you think Lennon was such an idealist, but I doubt you will find a statement on a single one of his albums releasing the rights to his music, lyrics, or phonorecordings into the public domain. He took part in The System. Really, there was no way he could have thrived without doing so.
He wasn't even above claiming copyright on other people's work on occasion (do you really think "Jamrag" on the 2-LP release of "Sometime in New York City" was written on the spot by Lennon/Ono? Or did the Mothers of Invention know to play it because Frank Zappa had already written it and had them learn it?).
Over here in the UK CBM Pets and Apple IIs were all over the business world.
Yes, but over there the Amiga and Atari ST were viable computing platforms also. In North America, the business desktop market was pretty much standardized on x86 by the mid-1980's.
I can understand anyone having a negative opinion if Amtrak is all you have had opportunity to experience. They are a freight network. Please do not judge modern commuter rail travel by their miserable example.
In the past few years I've experienced regional rail travel administered by SEPTA, NJ Transit, Long Island Railroad, Metro-North, and MBTA. They all suck at least as bad as Amtrak.
Bullet trains will never be cost-effective in the United States. Through sparsely-populated areas, the profit potential is too weak to justify the billions of dollars of infrastructure development. Through densely-populated areas, high-speed rail falls prey to the Not In My Backyard problem. The Northeast Corridor is full of areas where residential housing abuts railroad right-of-ways; the noise and danger of having an ultrafast train passing within 100 feet of somebody's home is hard to justify.
I can't begin to describe how useful it is to keep a comprehensive email history.
Oh, absolutely. The point, I think, is that the "Inbox" folder is not the right place for such an archive. It is for NEW incoming messages, things you have not read yet. Move them to anothe folder to archive them.
Careful, Gates calls people with ideas like yours "Terrorists."
No he doesn't. And as far as I'm aware, he never has in the past, either.
I realize that Gates-bashing and Microsoft-bashing are popular pastimes here at Slashdot, but maybe we could limit our attacks to things that they have actually done or said?
I can't fathom how they are going to add HDMI to the current 360s
I'm not too familiar with the internals of the XBox 360 hardware, but I do know that the A/V port on it is incompatible with that on the original XBox, and I assume there's a good reason for this.
It's possible (though entirely speculative) that the 360's GPU may be capable of outputting a digital signal which could interface with HDMI equipment.
right up until they start releasing certain games only on HDDVD because the size is too large for a regular DVD.
I believe Microsoft has already stated that the HD-DVD drive will be used for movies only, though that's as subject to change as anything else in this world.
I'd love to play Lord of the Rings or Madden with HD cut scenes.
I would hate that.
It's already jarring enough on a title like LotR for PS2 when the graphics cut from DVD-Video cinematic cutscene to realtime rendered polygons. Making the cutscenes look even better would only make the in-game graphics look worse in comparison.
But they haven't even tried to tackle this idea of "convergence" or trying to create an "all-in-one" device
In Japan, the Play-Yan media player has been an official Nintendo product for years, allowing users to listen to MP3's and watch movies on GBA SP and DS systems.
Opera web browser for Nintendo DS is coming out soon.
They should offer it as one of the few handhelds that let you make your own games and share them with friends.
I dunno, dude. The Gizmondo and GP32 were both handhelds that were pretty much designed expressly for homebrew gaming (and by that, I of course mean "emulators and warez0red ROMS"), and neither of them has found the success of even an N-Gage.
(Okay, so the Gizmondo was actually designed mainly to get venture capital to spend on fast cars and fast women, but my point about the GP32 stands.)
The homebrew scene just doesn't sell that many consoles.
Samus's reveal was more of a bonus surprise for dedicated players than anything else
If by "dedicated players" you mean the 1987 definition, which was "kids who knew enough other gamers that one of them eventually found out about the JUSTIN BAILEY code", then yes.
I'd wager more people learned Samus's gender from entering that password than from completing the game quickly.
Democrats saw Leiberman as too close to President George W. Bush, not necessarily the Republican party.
Yes, but Democrats tend to see the entire Republican Party as too close to President Bush, also.
gerrymandered districts (which is a serious cancer on democracy spreading throughout this nation so _wake up_)
Oh, I'm awake. But as long as the power to define districts belongs to the people who have the most to lose or gain from redistricting -- and also the power to change the laws that say who has the power to define districts -- how is anything going to change?
I think it's strange how 20-30 years ago, college dropouts could do so well.
Even 20-30 years ago, it was the exception and not the rule for a college dropout to be as successful in the business world as guys like Gates, Jobs, and Dell did.
The thousands of other entrepreneurs who did not and could not have been as successful as they were without their college degrees do not get talked about quite as much.
Who are all of those people I see lined up at the symphony, bookstores and museums, Mario Mushrooms?
If you live in a place large enough for there to be people lined up at the symphony, bookstores, and museums -- a place large enough to HAVE a symphony or museums -- then you live in a place large enough that even if there's 5,000 people in attendance, that's still only a tiny tiny percentage of the city's entire population.
I would bet that Major League Baseball fills more seats in a single game day than all of the United States' orchestras do in an entire month. "Highbrow" pursuits are, simply put, not very popular compared to other pastimes. Why should video gaming be any different?
Making the software open source would have no effect on the dispute
Not at this point in the process, no. But if the city had required Open Source code as a stipulation of the original contract, Hoboken would be free to seek other vendors for continuing operations of the garage, instead of being (very literally) locked in to a vendor that they would obviously rather not do business with anymore.
That's because sound cards use 3 stereo cables, while receivers use Dolby encoding over one pair of cables.
Maybe receivers did ten years ago, when Dolby Pro Logic was state of the art in home theater audio.
Home theater audio interconnect is digital these days. You either have a Dolby AC3 or a DTS signal going over the audio pins on an HDMI cable, or over an optical TOSlink cable, or a digital coaxial connection. If your PC doesn't have a digital audio out (and if it doesn't, it's not very well suited for the living room), many receivers have a set of 6 RCA inputs corresponding to discrete 5.1 analog channels.
Those were less scoring and more properly manipulating midi
Why make a distinction between the two?
If anything, MIDI scoring is more difficult than scoring for live musicians. A human musician is trained to give nuance to the music, to balance within the ensemble, to make the music sound natural. To get the same effect out of a group of crude electronic waveform generators, or even a set of looped samples of real musicians, is a painstaking task involving a lot of data shaping. The musicianship has to be added in manually, one byte at a time.
Between high-speed internet connections and the ever-decreasing cost of high-capacity flash RAM, it's absolutely conceivable that "disks" won't be the primary *portable and removeable* storage medium in the not-too-distant future.
Sony's big push in this console generation is that your 4-9GB DVD discs aren't sufficient anymore, you need to 25-50GB capacity of BluRay in order to experience gaming to its fullest.
Currently, a fair price for Flash RAM is around $24/GB. Assuming that the cost per gigabyte halves every 18 months between now and 2012, it will still take hundreds of dollars in media costs alone to store a PS3-sized game. Are you willing to give up your shiny disks for (a return to) solid-state storage if it means you'll pay thrice as much per game?
What about online distribution? Assuming the typical home broadband connection hits 2Mb/second by the time of the PS4 (which is unlikely), it's still going to take over ten hours to download even a modest BluRay game, and that's assuming a sustained transfer rate. Not going to happen.
Either games are going to get larger, or game distribution will move on beyond the optical disk medium. Unless the PS4 is also going to be limited to compact, retro-influenced games like those on Xbox Live Arcade and the Nintendo Virtual Console, Sony cannot have it both ways.
Well, the Intellivision was backwards-compatible with Atari VCS games first, via an add-on unit. So were the Colecovision and Atari 5200. The 7800 may have been the first console to support a previous-generation console's cartridge library right out of the box -- a feature that up until this generation has only been duplicated by the Gameboys Color and Advance, PlayStation 2, and the Nintendo DS.
So at somepoint you will have a lower price for the PS3, but less reliable backwords compatibility.
It's not exactly cost-free for Sony to be developing a software system capable of 100% emulation of the PS2 hardware on the PS3, you know. That's a job that's going to cost millions of dollars in development costs, assuming it's even possible at all.
Sony may publicly be hoping to be able to take the PS2-on-a-chip out of the PS3 case at some future time, but personally I don't believe the prognosis is all that good. Either way, you're going to be paying extra for back compatibility when you buy a PS3.
not bowing to 8-bit throwbacks like awkward controls
Maybe it's just me, but I've always felt that the 2D Castlevania games had much less awkward controls than the 3D games. Sure, it was a little tricky to have 'B' as the whip, and 'up+B' as the special item sometimes, but compared to Castlevania 64's array of buttons for ducking and whipping and swording and dashing... it's like they felt obligated to find a use for every button on the N64 controller.
and artificial difficulty (eg having to memorize where every Medusa head is going to be before you can successfully make a jump).
Oh come on, they were just simple sinusoid movements. Not that hard to predict.
Maybe Conker just sucks as a game? Haven't played it myself, but I don't see many people pining over the days of Conker...
Conker's Bad Fur Day was a late release in the Nintendo 64's lifespan. Many of the gamers of that time were either losing interest in games entirely, or moving on to newer consoles like the Dreamcast.
I have to assume there was at least SOME nostalgia for it, though, or Rare wouldn't have bothered giving it a makeover and releasing it as an online-enabled Xbox title.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not sheet music, because it doesn't include the instrument-indepent staff.
It IS sheet music, because essential melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic aspects of the music can be derived from the tablature. That, to me, satisfies all the identity requirements of "sheet music". It's not just a term that applies to musical notation consisting of five lines, four spaces, and a G-clef.
It's artistic interpretation.
If the interpretation bears a resemblance to the original work, then it is a derivative work. And if it is a derivative work, then it is subject to copyright law. And if it is subject to copyright law, then the creator has a limited right to control distribution of his/her work and its derivatives.
What it actually is is reverse-engineering. Whether we have the same legal right to distribute reverse-engineered music as we do to distribute reverse-engineered computer code is a question I am not prepared to debate.
What is the ideal solution to the OLGA situation? Artists should sell their own official lyric books/sheet music/tablature. There's clearly a market for it, and with internet distribution and and army of starving former Music majors out there looking for transcription work, it should cost them next to nothing.
Indeed, recall the lyrics to Imagine:
It's nice that you think Lennon was such an idealist, but I doubt you will find a statement on a single one of his albums releasing the rights to his music, lyrics, or phonorecordings into the public domain. He took part in The System. Really, there was no way he could have thrived without doing so.
He wasn't even above claiming copyright on other people's work on occasion (do you really think "Jamrag" on the 2-LP release of "Sometime in New York City" was written on the spot by Lennon/Ono? Or did the Mothers of Invention know to play it because Frank Zappa had already written it and had them learn it?).
Over here in the UK CBM Pets and Apple IIs were all over the business world.
Yes, but over there the Amiga and Atari ST were viable computing platforms also. In North America, the business desktop market was pretty much standardized on x86 by the mid-1980's.
I can understand anyone having a negative opinion if Amtrak is all you have had opportunity to experience. They are a freight network. Please do not judge modern commuter rail travel by their miserable example.
In the past few years I've experienced regional rail travel administered by SEPTA, NJ Transit, Long Island Railroad, Metro-North, and MBTA. They all suck at least as bad as Amtrak.
Bullet trains will never be cost-effective in the United States. Through sparsely-populated areas, the profit potential is too weak to justify the billions of dollars of infrastructure development. Through densely-populated areas, high-speed rail falls prey to the Not In My Backyard problem. The Northeast Corridor is full of areas where residential housing abuts railroad right-of-ways; the noise and danger of having an ultrafast train passing within 100 feet of somebody's home is hard to justify.
I can't begin to describe how useful it is to keep a comprehensive email history.
Oh, absolutely. The point, I think, is that the "Inbox" folder is not the right place for such an archive. It is for NEW incoming messages, things you have not read yet. Move them to anothe folder to archive them.
Careful, Gates calls people with ideas like yours "Terrorists."
No he doesn't. And as far as I'm aware, he never has in the past, either.
I realize that Gates-bashing and Microsoft-bashing are popular pastimes here at Slashdot, but maybe we could limit our attacks to things that they have actually done or said?
I can't fathom how they are going to add HDMI to the current 360s
I'm not too familiar with the internals of the XBox 360 hardware, but I do know that the A/V port on it is incompatible with that on the original XBox, and I assume there's a good reason for this.
It's possible (though entirely speculative) that the 360's GPU may be capable of outputting a digital signal which could interface with HDMI equipment.
right up until they start releasing certain games only on HDDVD because the size is too large for a regular DVD.
I believe Microsoft has already stated that the HD-DVD drive will be used for movies only, though that's as subject to change as anything else in this world.
I'd love to play Lord of the Rings or Madden with HD cut scenes.
I would hate that.
It's already jarring enough on a title like LotR for PS2 when the graphics cut from DVD-Video cinematic cutscene to realtime rendered polygons. Making the cutscenes look even better would only make the in-game graphics look worse in comparison.
But they haven't even tried to tackle this idea of "convergence" or trying to create an "all-in-one" device
In Japan, the Play-Yan media player has been an official Nintendo product for years, allowing users to listen to MP3's and watch movies on GBA SP and DS systems.
Opera web browser for Nintendo DS is coming out soon.
They should offer it as one of the few handhelds that let you make your own games and share them with friends.
I dunno, dude. The Gizmondo and GP32 were both handhelds that were pretty much designed expressly for homebrew gaming (and by that, I of course mean "emulators and warez0red ROMS"), and neither of them has found the success of even an N-Gage.
(Okay, so the Gizmondo was actually designed mainly to get venture capital to spend on fast cars and fast women, but my point about the GP32 stands.)
The homebrew scene just doesn't sell that many consoles.
Samus's reveal was more of a bonus surprise for dedicated players than anything else
If by "dedicated players" you mean the 1987 definition, which was "kids who knew enough other gamers that one of them eventually found out about the JUSTIN BAILEY code", then yes.
I'd wager more people learned Samus's gender from entering that password than from completing the game quickly.
Democrats saw Leiberman as too close to President George W. Bush, not necessarily the Republican party.
Yes, but Democrats tend to see the entire Republican Party as too close to President Bush, also.
gerrymandered districts (which is a serious cancer on democracy spreading throughout this nation so _wake up_)
Oh, I'm awake. But as long as the power to define districts belongs to the people who have the most to lose or gain from redistricting -- and also the power to change the laws that say who has the power to define districts -- how is anything going to change?
I think it's strange how 20-30 years ago, college dropouts could do so well.
Even 20-30 years ago, it was the exception and not the rule for a college dropout to be as successful in the business world as guys like Gates, Jobs, and Dell did.
The thousands of other entrepreneurs who did not and could not have been as successful as they were without their college degrees do not get talked about quite as much.
Who are all of those people I see lined up at the symphony, bookstores and museums, Mario Mushrooms?
If you live in a place large enough for there to be people lined up at the symphony, bookstores, and museums -- a place large enough to HAVE a symphony or museums -- then you live in a place large enough that even if there's 5,000 people in attendance, that's still only a tiny tiny percentage of the city's entire population.
I would bet that Major League Baseball fills more seats in a single game day than all of the United States' orchestras do in an entire month. "Highbrow" pursuits are, simply put, not very popular compared to other pastimes. Why should video gaming be any different?
It could have at least thrown a few cars around and eaten somebody, but no!
Well, this same robot garage DID drop somebody's SUV from half a story up a couple months ago. Is that good enough?
Making the software open source would have no effect on the dispute
Not at this point in the process, no. But if the city had required Open Source code as a stipulation of the original contract, Hoboken would be free to seek other vendors for continuing operations of the garage, instead of being (very literally) locked in to a vendor that they would obviously rather not do business with anymore.
There are open source apps you still have to pay to use, aren't there? And if you fail to pay, you lose your right to use the software, no?
Are there? I challenge Slashdot to name one.
That's because sound cards use 3 stereo cables, while receivers use Dolby encoding over one pair of cables.
Maybe receivers did ten years ago, when Dolby Pro Logic was state of the art in home theater audio.
Home theater audio interconnect is digital these days. You either have a Dolby AC3 or a DTS signal going over the audio pins on an HDMI cable, or over an optical TOSlink cable, or a digital coaxial connection. If your PC doesn't have a digital audio out (and if it doesn't, it's not very well suited for the living room), many receivers have a set of 6 RCA inputs corresponding to discrete 5.1 analog channels.
Those were less scoring and more properly manipulating midi
Why make a distinction between the two?
If anything, MIDI scoring is more difficult than scoring for live musicians. A human musician is trained to give nuance to the music, to balance within the ensemble, to make the music sound natural. To get the same effect out of a group of crude electronic waveform generators, or even a set of looped samples of real musicians, is a painstaking task involving a lot of data shaping. The musicianship has to be added in manually, one byte at a time.
Between high-speed internet connections and the ever-decreasing cost of high-capacity flash RAM, it's absolutely conceivable that "disks" won't be the primary *portable and removeable* storage medium in the not-too-distant future.
Sony's big push in this console generation is that your 4-9GB DVD discs aren't sufficient anymore, you need to 25-50GB capacity of BluRay in order to experience gaming to its fullest.
Currently, a fair price for Flash RAM is around $24/GB. Assuming that the cost per gigabyte halves every 18 months between now and 2012, it will still take hundreds of dollars in media costs alone to store a PS3-sized game. Are you willing to give up your shiny disks for (a return to) solid-state storage if it means you'll pay thrice as much per game?
What about online distribution? Assuming the typical home broadband connection hits 2Mb/second by the time of the PS4 (which is unlikely), it's still going to take over ten hours to download even a modest BluRay game, and that's assuming a sustained transfer rate. Not going to happen.
Either games are going to get larger, or game distribution will move on beyond the optical disk medium. Unless the PS4 is also going to be limited to compact, retro-influenced games like those on Xbox Live Arcade and the Nintendo Virtual Console, Sony cannot have it both ways.
As far as Consoles go; Atari, Did it first.
Well, the Intellivision was backwards-compatible with Atari VCS games first, via an add-on unit. So were the Colecovision and Atari 5200. The 7800 may have been the first console to support a previous-generation console's cartridge library right out of the box -- a feature that up until this generation has only been duplicated by the Gameboys Color and Advance, PlayStation 2, and the Nintendo DS.
So at somepoint you will have a lower price for the PS3, but less reliable backwords compatibility.
It's not exactly cost-free for Sony to be developing a software system capable of 100% emulation of the PS2 hardware on the PS3, you know. That's a job that's going to cost millions of dollars in development costs, assuming it's even possible at all.
Sony may publicly be hoping to be able to take the PS2-on-a-chip out of the PS3 case at some future time, but personally I don't believe the prognosis is all that good. Either way, you're going to be paying extra for back compatibility when you buy a PS3.
not bowing to 8-bit throwbacks like awkward controls
Maybe it's just me, but I've always felt that the 2D Castlevania games had much less awkward controls than the 3D games. Sure, it was a little tricky to have 'B' as the whip, and 'up+B' as the special item sometimes, but compared to Castlevania 64's array of buttons for ducking and whipping and swording and dashing... it's like they felt obligated to find a use for every button on the N64 controller.
and artificial difficulty (eg having to memorize where every Medusa head is going to be before you can successfully make a jump).
Oh come on, they were just simple sinusoid movements. Not that hard to predict.
Maybe Conker just sucks as a game? Haven't played it myself, but I don't see many people pining over the days of Conker...
Conker's Bad Fur Day was a late release in the Nintendo 64's lifespan. Many of the gamers of that time were either losing interest in games entirely, or moving on to newer consoles like the Dreamcast.
I have to assume there was at least SOME nostalgia for it, though, or Rare wouldn't have bothered giving it a makeover and releasing it as an online-enabled Xbox title.