There is no obligation to give it away as shown by the BBC.
The BBC is funded in exactly the same way as NRK and yet have a far more restrictive approach to the distribution of their stuff. As an example, you can't stream BBC content to Norway.
So, the approach NRK have taken here is different and rather news worthy.
To be fair, the BBC donÂt behave like that at all.
It is simply that people with a strong political view are always going to get upset with, and therefore remember, stories that don`t support their own view yet dismiss those that do as simply being the truth. Therefore a truly unbiased news outlet that actually has real teeth is always going to look like it leans towards the opposition for those with strong political views.
I admire the BBC. They have managed to remain pretty independent and also pretty good despite the very strong capitalistic pressure of the last few years. They still don`t advertise, in the UK at least and have many surprising projects to their name. Teletext, the BBC micro and a whole host of community involved science projects over the years.
The BBC isn`t government controlled. It is publicly funded and the amount of that funding is set ultimately by government.
The proof for BBC independence is that whatever government is in power, their supporters always claim the BBC is a puppet of the opposition. This is exactly how an unbiased news outlet should be perceived in my view.
You could argue that as the government sets the tax level (after lobbying from the BBC) that it can control the content but any government that tried to do that would be swiftly out on its ear.
The BBC has never been "nationalized" either. It has always been independent, though financed through a special "license" you buy in order to receive its television broadcasts. BBC radio has not required this license for many years.
The auto-focus on the Canon 1Ds Mk III was, indeed, "useless" for those that needed high speed multliple shots, such as sports photographers. People were up in arms about it and Canon eventually did something about it in firmware.
I can see how your $30 solution will be ideal for photographers out in the field or at a wedding. Photographers love adding to the things they have to carry around with them especially when they could have bought a laptop that didn't need a hood attachment.
You are "splitting" your understanding of who photographers are. A photographer at a sports venue may well send everything but a photographer doing a model shoot will almost certainly do a little bit of image manipulation before showing the images to the client. Model clients like to see the images immediately these days you know and laptops make that possible. In any case are you saying that only the needs of "the big boys" are relevant?
OSX is not particularly consistent nor is it particularly well designed. It is, however, pretty.
The dock from a functional point of view is awful. It gets in the way when your mouse is near the bottom of the screen so you can accidentally start apps, the small blue dot is a ridiculous visual clue as to what is running, it takes a single click to start apps whereas in finder you do double clicks. Not very consistent that and neither is apps not exiting when you hit "close", apart, that is, from that apps that do exit when you hit "close".
Still it works well enough but I really wish people like KDE and Microsoft would stop stealing ideas from what isn't a particularly good interface.
All quotes are pretty irrelevant when the kde.org website linked to KDE 4.0 under the heading "Stable release" and 3.5 under the heading "Legacy release".
It is a development release now but it wasn't then. When KDE 4.0 came out it was linked to as "Stable release" on the KDE web site with the "Legacy release" being 3.5.X.
The KDE crowd eventually admitted this was a mistake and changed it to what we see now which was the right thing to do. However, revisionist history does not make their mistake go away and I know they lost a lot of users over it.
I, for one, was KDE only from the original KDE Beta 2 realised KDE was now a dead end for me and ended up on a Mac as a result. I dislike OSX but if you're going to run a desktop you hate you may as well get simple hardware integration as compensation.
Have you tried the keyboard on the iPhone though? It looks like it would be a piece of crap but with the dictionary turned on it guesses pretty much what I meant to type about 90% of the time. The upshot is it ends up being the most accurate mini-keyboard I`ve ever used.
You can SMS and type e-mail fast, easily using three or four fingers and the result usually isn`t far off what you meant.
Have to disagree here. I bought a first generation iPhone because it meant I didnÂt need to carry my phone and my Creative Zen with me on the train to work. I had never had any Apple gear at all. After using it for a bit I found the iPhone to be the only phone I had ever owned that didn`t make me want to throw it down the toilet. I loved using it.
As I was Linux only I bought a Mac mini so I could run iTunes and then bought a Mac book pro for some reason.
I have discovered I hate OSX and pretty much everything Apple with a passion but the only thing that would make me stop using the iPhone (and therefore the Mac) would be a phone that behaved in a similar way but didn`t require me to crack the firmware all the time so I can use the phone supplier of my own choice.
I`m not being "ridiculously semantic". I used the term "MIDI music" when pointing out the error in the original comment because that was the term previous posters used. Having said that, nobody refers to MIDI music they only refer to MIDI files and that`s for a reason.
A CD has the finished music encoded digitally. The actual sound you hear is affected to some extent by the post-processing that your player does but is really pretty minimal.
"MIDI music" is a collection of numbers. If you "play" it all it does is say to the "playing" equipment e.g. "select instrument number 58 and play a c# for this long and at this volume". It doesn`t even tell you what instrument number 58 is. You choose what instrument is at number 58 so you can make Ode to Joy come out on a piano or a drum kit.
There is a "standard" set of instruments which isn`t very standard that most people don`t use that defines e.g. a classic piano as instrument number 1. It is called General MIDI but there is so much it doesn`t define and it also only has a limited number of instruments so it is impossible for professional musicians to stick to.
The actual sound you hear when using a MIDI file is completely controlled by some other system for synthesizing noise. If you have a crappy synth module you`ll get sound like a kids toy. If you have a high quality synth or, more likely, set of instrument samples you`ll get sound indistinguishable from the real instrument.
Well, the discussion has centered around the idea that there is such a thing as "MIDI music" which is just nonsense. Fact is MIDI doesnÂt make any noise at all.
The keyboard you are talking about is both a MIDI keyboard and a synthesizer. Nowadays most people donÂt have that synthesizer in their keyboard and if they do, they just turn it off.
I agree that the cheapest keyboard is likely to incorporate some nasty synthesizer in it. $4000 digital keyboards are very hard to come by these days at all. However, some of the most expensive ones around donÂt generate sounds though some do have synthesizers and sequencers built in. Not sure that they get used that much except for show though.
Seriously, Ode to Joy done in MIDI? Are you trying to scare your children away from Beethoven?
"MIDI" is a protocol for defining musical events and there is no correlation between its use and audio fidelity.
You can buy a MIDI keyboard at a professional music gear shop for $4,000, or you can buy a MIDI keyboard at Walmart for $99. As you can imagine, the difference in sound quality between these two models will be profound -- but they're both still MIDI.
They will sound exactly the same i.e. neither of them will make a sound at all. What they might do is drive their own internal synthesizer which will be better or worse quality depending on price but many professional keyboards don`t do this.
A good modern MIDI keyboard will be completely incapable of making a sound. Mine can`t. When you pay a lot of money for a midi keyboard you are paying for the weight and responsiveness of the keys, the number of sliders and knobs it has to send additional MIDI events and the quality of the parts. You might also be paying for the name of course.
Though I know next to nothing about Wii Music, I do know that this reviewer isn't very good.
The bizarre statement "archaic, amateur MIDI" is only slightly less weird than the concept of deriding an "Ode to Joy done in MIDI".
I take it you, and this reviewer do not know what MIDI is. MIDI is only a protocol for describing musical events. It has no sound of its own.
All professional recording studios make extensive use of MIDI for driving sampled or modeled instruments or for syncing and for hardware controllers (e.g. those exciting desks full of sliders and knobs).
I guarantee you that most of the music you listen to, even live stage music, is driven by MIDI.
To be fair, OSX isn't all crud. It's core audio subsystem beats the living crap out of Linux and alsa. You can plug in vast arrays of midi or audio devices into firewire or USB ports and OSX handles it beautifully. You can pull them out, aggregate them together or whatever you like but mostly you plug things in and the correct thing happens.
However, the rest of OSX drives me nuts. It is inconsistent, stupid and not particularly efficient.
That sums it up nicely. This year I joined the Apple world with a macbook pro, a mac mini, an iPhone and Logic.
Maybe having been a Linux user for some ten years has spoilt me but OSX certainly doesnÂt seem stable to me. ItÂs bloody awful really. If Ardour and Rosegarden were anything like Logic (and I could get a version of East WestÂs gorgeous sampled intruments to work) I would seriously consider going back to Linux. I wonÂt be buying any more Apple stuff but that leaves Windows as my only option. Do I want to be raped or just used and discarded.
No it won`t. It would out resolve current lens technology by an order of magnitude.
This is a gimick. If you want a quality camera that has the benefits of speedy focus, shutter speeds, flash sync, good bulb shutter, great light metering, white balance and can drive a flash at low power/high speed, can be quickly adjusted to suit the shooting conditions etc etc etc, you want a device where the R&D has gone into making a camera. If you want video, you need a video camera.
Another fave was to have a script named e.g./usr/local/bin/shutter which looked like this
#!/bin/sh echo/usr/local/bin/shutter | at now + 1 # insert favourite shutdown command here sync && sync && haltsys
And then run it. I'm not sure if it is still the case but "at" used to run commands whose time to run had past as soon as it was able, in this case, when it was next booted.
This is a misunderstanding that many people seem to be making. There is no point in making an adapter. The USB protocol is not an alternative for firewire. Firewire streams data significantly better than than USB and with far less CPU overhead.
While this doesnÂt matter too much for those attaching a disk to the computer, those activities that require this capability e.g. Music and video mixing, editing or recording will not work over USB without significant increase in CPU, RAM and ports.
While this may seem a small minority or people, it is actually a large number of people who record music as a hobby or in an effort to become mega stars.
Not only that but nearly every single recording studio in the world uses apple because every friggin device uses firewire for bandwith and low latency if it doesnÂt use ethernet.
Pretty much anybody who likes to record music or mix music live at home or on stage needs firewire. There isnÂt an alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no obligation to give it away as shown by the BBC.
The BBC is funded in exactly the same way as NRK and yet have a far more restrictive approach to the distribution of their stuff. As an example, you can't stream BBC content to Norway.
So, the approach NRK have taken here is different and rather news worthy.
Great update.
For me, standards across all the *nix flavours is key so I probably won't use associated arrays in a shell script. Can't help but like them though.
Love that we finally have co-processes, hate that the syntax is completely non-standard.
Great to see bash updated though.
Perhaps "puppet" is too strong a word. The Labour government have tried to shut the BBC up though as did the Conservatives before them.
I would agree that on the whole the BBC are perceived as slightly left wing but who knows, maybe the truth is slightly left wing too.
To be fair, the BBC donÂt behave like that at all.
It is simply that people with a strong political view are always going to get upset with, and therefore remember, stories that don`t support their own view yet dismiss those that do as simply being the truth. Therefore a truly unbiased news outlet that actually has real teeth is always going to look like it leans towards the opposition for those with strong political views.
I admire the BBC. They have managed to remain pretty independent and also pretty good despite the very strong capitalistic pressure of the last few years. They still don`t advertise, in the UK at least and have many surprising projects to their name. Teletext, the BBC micro and a whole host of community involved science projects over the years.
The BBC isn`t government controlled. It is publicly funded and the amount of that funding is set ultimately by government.
The proof for BBC independence is that whatever government is in power, their supporters always claim the BBC is a puppet of the opposition. This is exactly how an unbiased news outlet should be perceived in my view.
You could argue that as the government sets the tax level (after lobbying from the BBC) that it can control the content but any government that tried to do that would be swiftly out on its ear.
The BBC has never been "nationalized" either. It has always been independent, though financed through a special "license" you buy in order to receive its television broadcasts. BBC radio has not required this license for many years.
The auto-focus on the Canon 1Ds Mk III was, indeed, "useless" for those that needed high speed multliple shots, such as sports photographers. People were up in arms about it and Canon eventually did something about it in firmware.
I can see how your $30 solution will be ideal for photographers out in the field or at a wedding. Photographers love adding to the things they have to carry around with them especially when they could have bought a laptop that didn't need a hood attachment.
You are "splitting" your understanding of who photographers are. A photographer at a sports venue may well send everything but a photographer doing a model shoot will almost certainly do a little bit of image manipulation before showing the images to the client. Model clients like to see the images immediately these days you know and laptops make that possible. In any case are you saying that only the needs of "the big boys" are relevant?
Rob Galbraith is pretty good at what he does.
OSX is not particularly consistent nor is it particularly well designed. It is, however, pretty.
The dock from a functional point of view is awful. It gets in the way when your mouse is near the bottom of the screen so you can accidentally start apps, the small blue dot is a ridiculous visual clue as to what is running, it takes a single click to start apps whereas in finder you do double clicks. Not very consistent that and neither is apps not exiting when you hit "close", apart, that is, from that apps that do exit when you hit "close".
Still it works well enough but I really wish people like KDE and Microsoft would stop stealing ideas from what isn't a particularly good interface.
All quotes are pretty irrelevant when the kde.org website linked to KDE 4.0 under the heading "Stable release" and 3.5 under the heading "Legacy release".
They fixed that since though.
It is a development release now but it wasn't then. When KDE 4.0 came out it was linked to as "Stable release" on the KDE web site with the "Legacy release" being 3.5.X.
The KDE crowd eventually admitted this was a mistake and changed it to what we see now which was the right thing to do. However, revisionist history does not make their mistake go away and I know they lost a lot of users over it.
I, for one, was KDE only from the original KDE Beta 2 realised KDE was now a dead end for me and ended up on a Mac as a result. I dislike OSX but if you're going to run a desktop you hate you may as well get simple hardware integration as compensation.
Actually it contains the information that you missed the point thus encouraging those who similarly missed the point to go back and re-read the post.
Thus it wasn`t completely devoid of information albeit, perhaps more your subliminal kind of information.
cheers
Excellent work missing the point.
Well done.
Have you tried the keyboard on the iPhone though? It looks like it would be a piece of crap but with the dictionary turned on it guesses pretty much what I meant to type about 90% of the time. The upshot is it ends up being the most accurate mini-keyboard I`ve ever used.
You can SMS and type e-mail fast, easily using three or four fingers and the result usually isn`t far off what you meant.
Have to disagree here. I bought a first generation iPhone because it meant I didnÂt need to carry my phone and my Creative Zen with me on the train to work. I had never had any Apple gear at all. After using it for a bit I found the iPhone to be the only phone I had ever owned that didn`t make me want to throw it down the toilet. I loved using it.
As I was Linux only I bought a Mac mini so I could run iTunes and then bought a Mac book pro for some reason.
I have discovered I hate OSX and pretty much everything Apple with a passion but the only thing that would make me stop using the iPhone (and therefore the Mac) would be a phone that behaved in a similar way but didn`t require me to crack the firmware all the time so I can use the phone supplier of my own choice.
I`m not being "ridiculously semantic". I used the term "MIDI music" when pointing out the error in the original comment because that was the term previous posters used. Having said that, nobody refers to MIDI music they only refer to MIDI files and that`s for a reason.
A CD has the finished music encoded digitally. The actual sound you hear is affected to some extent by the post-processing that your player does but is really pretty minimal.
"MIDI music" is a collection of numbers. If you "play" it all it does is say to the "playing" equipment e.g. "select instrument number 58 and play a c# for this long and at this volume". It doesn`t even tell you what instrument number 58 is. You choose what instrument is at number 58 so you can make Ode to Joy come out on a piano or a drum kit.
There is a "standard" set of instruments which isn`t very standard that most people don`t use that defines e.g. a classic piano as instrument number 1. It is called General MIDI but there is so much it doesn`t define and it also only has a limited number of instruments so it is impossible for professional musicians to stick to.
The actual sound you hear when using a MIDI file is completely controlled by some other system for synthesizing noise. If you have a crappy synth module you`ll get sound like a kids toy. If you have a high quality synth or, more likely, set of instrument samples you`ll get sound indistinguishable from the real instrument.
Well, the discussion has centered around the idea that there is such a thing as "MIDI music" which is just nonsense. Fact is MIDI doesnÂt make any noise at all.
The keyboard you are talking about is both a MIDI keyboard and a synthesizer. Nowadays most people donÂt have that synthesizer in their keyboard and if they do, they just turn it off.
I agree that the cheapest keyboard is likely to incorporate some nasty synthesizer in it. $4000 digital keyboards are very hard to come by these days at all. However, some of the most expensive ones around donÂt generate sounds though some do have synthesizers and sequencers built in. Not sure that they get used that much except for show though.
Seriously, Ode to Joy done in MIDI? Are you trying to scare your children away from Beethoven?
"MIDI" is a protocol for defining musical events and there is no correlation between its use and audio fidelity.
You can buy a MIDI keyboard at a professional music gear shop for $4,000, or you can buy a MIDI keyboard at Walmart for $99. As you can imagine, the difference in sound quality between these two models will be profound -- but they're both still MIDI.
They will sound exactly the same i.e. neither of them will make a sound at all. What they might do is drive their own internal synthesizer which will be better or worse quality depending on price but many professional keyboards don`t do this.
A good modern MIDI keyboard will be completely incapable of making a sound. Mine can`t. When you pay a lot of money for a midi keyboard you are paying for the weight and responsiveness of the keys, the number of sliders and knobs it has to send additional MIDI events and the quality of the parts. You might also be paying for the name of course.
Though I know next to nothing about Wii Music, I do know that this reviewer isn't very good.
The bizarre statement "archaic, amateur MIDI" is only slightly less weird than the concept of deriding an "Ode to Joy done in MIDI".
I take it you, and this reviewer do not know what MIDI is. MIDI is only a protocol for describing musical events. It has no sound of its own.
All professional recording studios make extensive use of MIDI for driving sampled or modeled instruments or for syncing and for hardware controllers (e.g. those exciting desks full of sliders and knobs).
I guarantee you that most of the music you listen to, even live stage music, is driven by MIDI.
It is really refreshing to read a post about the EU from someone who seems to know something about it.
Discussions about the EU tend to be full of hysterical nonsense with no facts. Your post is an exception.
By the way, the only part of your post that made me realise you are not a native English speaker was the apology at the end.
To be fair, OSX isn't all crud. It's core audio subsystem beats the living crap out of Linux and alsa. You can plug in vast arrays of midi or audio devices into firewire or USB ports and OSX handles it beautifully. You can pull them out, aggregate them together or whatever you like but mostly you plug things in and the correct thing happens.
However, the rest of OSX drives me nuts. It is inconsistent, stupid and not particularly efficient.
Amen to that. Sometimes I remember to press the right combination of keys but mostly I don't. (apostrophe courtesy of Linux this time)
That sums it up nicely. This year I joined the Apple world with a macbook pro, a mac mini, an iPhone and Logic.
Maybe having been a Linux user for some ten years has spoilt me but OSX certainly doesnÂt seem stable to me. ItÂs bloody awful really. If Ardour and Rosegarden were anything like Logic (and I could get a version of East WestÂs gorgeous sampled intruments to work) I would seriously consider going back to Linux. I wonÂt be buying any more Apple stuff but that leaves Windows as my only option. Do I want to be raped or just used and discarded.
Tough choice.
No it won`t. It would out resolve current lens technology by an order of magnitude.
This is a gimick. If you want a quality camera that has the benefits of speedy focus, shutter speeds, flash sync, good bulb shutter, great light metering, white balance and can drive a flash at low power/high speed, can be quickly adjusted to suit the shooting conditions etc etc etc, you want a device where the R&D has gone into making a camera. If you want video, you need a video camera.
Needs minor adjustment from Unix to Unix though
sed -i 's/id:3/id:0/' /etc/inittab
Another fave was to have a script named e.g. /usr/local/bin/shutter which looked like this
#!/bin/sh /usr/local/bin/shutter | at now + 1
echo
# insert favourite shutdown command here
sync && sync && haltsys
And then run it. I'm not sure if it is still the case but "at" used to run commands whose time to run had past as soon as it was able, in this case, when it was next booted.
This is a misunderstanding that many people seem to be making. There is no point in making an adapter. The USB protocol is not an alternative for firewire. Firewire streams data significantly better than than USB and with far less CPU overhead.
While this doesnÂt matter too much for those attaching a disk to the computer, those activities that require this capability e.g. Music and video mixing, editing or recording will not work over USB without significant increase in CPU, RAM and ports.
While this may seem a small minority or people, it is actually a large number of people who record music as a hobby or in an effort to become mega stars.
Not only that but nearly every single recording studio in the world uses apple because every friggin device uses firewire for bandwith and low latency if it doesnÂt use ethernet.
Pretty much anybody who likes to record music or mix music live at home or on stage needs firewire. There isnÂt an alternative.