If you had a modicum of musical education you would know that people like Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhaussen, Mario Lavista, Steve Reich and many others (just to name a few) liberated music from the restrictions of using a limited set of artifacts.
This "contorversy" has shown so many times during the history of music that ia a non issue for anybody curious enough to lear about it. The piano, the electronic keyboard, the sax, were all at one time or another derided as bastardizations of real musical instruments. I am sure you would have been there gleefully plotting for the demise of these instruments if you had lived in those days.
If you can combine sounds using any techniques you want, you are a musician.
That does not mean I have to like what you do, in all likelyhood what you do will be crap, but the creative act of arranging sounds in porpouse with a aesthetic porpouse is to make music.
Most composers rehash ideas many times, these ideas are longer than most people appreciate.
Vivaldi? Mozart? Beethoven? Wagner? Stravinsky? Shostakovich? The Beattles? You name it.
You may think they deal with smaller musical blocks, but that is because you are not a composer or maybe even a musician.
Trained musicians see bigger blocks as coherent entities, composers even more so. Most musical pieces, even very long ones, will gravitate around 3 or 4 basic idease that are developped at nauseam.
Outstanding example of this is the fugue that in principle uses one musical idea (which can be quite long) for a piece that may last many minutes. Musicians will discover that idea and treat it as a unique musical thought where novices would be struggling to make head from toes embroiled on the details.
What do the iTunes fan boys get on exchange for they hard earned cash?
A series of magnetics marks in a hard disk that can be interpreted as music.
In reality they get nothing. Once they "buy" this music they can't trade it, share it ( and here I mean share it in the sense you share a vinyl or CD: to your hearts content if so you wish), give it as a gift.
So they have been convinced that they have to pay money for thin air. Whoa, what an accomplishment.
May it be that people using othe players realize the big con that selling music in electronic form is?
Music is a communal human experience, it is not a comodity that you can pack and sell.
While the music industry provided some service ( a CD, and object you own) there was a point about buying music, but now that anything they have to offer is nothing and the promise to sue you if you copy that nothingness most peopl (except Apple fanboys and girls) realize that this is a scam.
If anything, such a poll shows how gullible Apple fans are (hey, they paid through the nose all these years for machines marginally better than most people's IBM compat PCs, so no surprise there).
"musician: One who composes, conducts, or performs music, especially instrumental music".
The above does not define music (why an instrumental musician is more musician than a singer, is beyond me).
So using the same piss poor reference you are using, I found the following: "music: The art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre".
Allowing for this crap defintion (a group of drums tunned to the same note have no melody or harmony strictly speaking, only rythm and of course a timbre) the important bit is this:
Most pop music does nothing for me, I find it boring and repetitive.
But I can recognize a musician when I hear one. If you think mixing does not require musical talent you obviously don't know what it means to create sounds using any technique whatsoever.
The musicians you so despectively call mixers are using techniques I can only dream to begin to understand (I can understand Stravinsky, John Cage or even more bizarre musicians that in general follow the western classical tradition). The music they do, although boring and yes, repetitive, sometimes shows some real creativity ant musical talent.
So no worries, we musicians can recognize our own kind, no need of closed minded slashbots to point them out to us.
.... then you need to learn a shell language and the OS utilities.
I would suggest you learn sh (Bourne Shell) first, since it is the most basic of them, is found in all UNIX or UNIX like OSes, and many modern ones are derived from it (in some systems is the shell used by default when you try to start an script).
Once you are comfortable with that try ksh or bash (but this one only if you have to). They are more versatile and adhere pretty much to sh's basic syntaxis.
Nowadays you design a service, and a service must include measures to ensure redundancy.
Or what was the plan? Deploy a single machine and hope for the best?
If the application was a game server for children in a kindergarten, well, it may not be critical.
But for more serious businesses or organizations of any kind, to ignore redundancy from the design phase and during testing, is simply a capital sin, especially now that hardware is cheap. The least one can do is using some virtualization software (like Vmware or similar) where you have an identical virtual system in an underutilized alternative machine.
But frankly now hardware is such small percentage of the cost of most projects that not to build redundancy from the start should be a sackable offense. If you are in a place where they can't afford expensive machines you can get very capable ones 2nd hand, at least in order to avoid this stupid oh my good I'll be fucked.
If you are for lack of hardware you deserve to be.
You (US) have zero uranium for practical purposes.
Certainly Canada and Australia will provide for you, but the other half of Uranium is in such promising places like Niger, Namibia, Uzbekistan, Kazhakstan and Russia.
Of course that is immaterial, nuclear power is uneconomical, companies providing nuclear power do so thanks to generous subsidies. These white elephants are bankrupt everywhere and almost bankrupted the French goverment, in the medium term uranium will not last long anyway, so we are just postponing the inevitable by a few years.
The only rational solution is to use less energy, and the energy we use has to come from renewable sources.
Any other solution based on mining something is basically wasting everybody's time.
Thank your good star if you abuse your eyes and have no problems.
The scientific body of evidence is overwhelming regarding the ill effect of spending too long in front of computer screens without taking any measures to ensure your vision is ok.
They did not redefine cinema in any way, they were very enjoyable movies, but ginema did not change dramatically in any way after those movies came along.
I you want a classic look for Metropolis, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Ragging Bull or Pulp Fiction.
What is the credibility of MS's Linux Lab when benchmarking Linux vs Windows?
In a scale of 1 to 10 I would say -1.
Honestly guys, keep the results to yourselves, and all the best for you. To publish them is a no win situation. If you say Windows is better in any measure it will be pointed out, rightly, that you are an interested party. If you find that Linux is better, well, I would like to see the day you plublish that. Most likely that will be quietly ignored.
I will tell you what. With Linux you become owner of your infrastructure. Once you have the dosh to move to commercially supported versions the migration is far less painful, not to mention that you always know that your data is accessible and protected agianst the whims of a coporate concern.
He plugged his PC to the Interenet using 8Mb broadband and, naively, did not take any security measures.
He did this for 3 days until for administrative reasons, his broadband access was cancelled.
A few days later he signed on for a new broadband connection with a different company and, thankfully for him as things turned out, the connection did not work.
He asked for my help and after 10 minutes I plugged his computer to the net.
A couple of minutes later we began to get pop-ups and realizing the machine was not protected I started ana analysis that revealed in excess of 40 different viruses and trojans, modifications of all kind to the registry and phising tampering with the hosts and lmhosts files in order to redirect unsuspectng people to phising websites.
After several hours of work with this machine (what, did you think my friend knew how to keep his machine up to date? Patched? Protected? And virus free? No way, he is a salesperon, not a geek) he asked me if there was anything he could do to be more resilient agains malware.
I had installed an antivirus, firewall and NATed his broadband access with a spare box, so I explained to him what I have done. He dimsayed, commented there should be a better way. At this point I mentioned Apple and Linux.
This guy, that know nothing about computing, was begging for a secure, user friendly solution. He needs very little office software: edit the odd text document, spreadsheet, anything else is perfectly catered by any OS you care to mention (Solaris, BSD, etc).
As for games, well, buy a console, you could use the same screen for your cheap computer and the games console.
I still believe most home computer users fit this profile very closely. If no company has tried to cater to them it is because all the anticompetitive practices of MS that has made this impractical for anybody. Where the only obstacle for MS complete dominance (government intervention) has been raised, the people at Redmond come very quickly with a cheap version of Windows. That is a testament to the amount of money they are getting out of their illegal handling of the monopolistic position they achieved.
If Google would have a stab at this they have a huge market to tap. And equally important, they have a recognized brand name people trust.
If there is anybody that could challenge the dominance of MS in the home computing area that is Google.
"User friendliness" is a completely subjective concept, and is, unsurprisingly, in the eye on the beholder. It is a combination of a bit of good design and a lot of time invested to learn a certain way to do things.
What many people mean in the context of computer graphical interfaces as "user friendly" is the interface they know best, which given the monopolic nature of desktop computing, we know exactly what that means: something is not user friendly if it does not ape Windows.
Any normal person trained to use Linux will find it as the pinnacle of user firendliness because the user would know nothing else. And this is a valid point, but it is not unsourmountable or set in stone.
When the freedom of you or your organization to choose the software you use is under threat, user friendliness should take a back seat IMHO, because it is something you can address once you have secured the acces to your data and the control of your software infrastructure.
That is why most companies have huge teams of WIndows monkeys: because the machines do not need any maintenance.
Putting modesty aside, Linux and UNIX types can manage 3 times the amount of machines an equally sized team of WIndows guys.
Linux and UNIX are immensily easier to mantain and rearely let you down once they are set up properly.
Relying on Windows is a completely false sense of economy. All the Linux machines that my relatives and friends have at my instigation need little maintenance, and when they do it can be done easily remotely or with scripts.
In dire contrast teh few friends that still dare to call themsleves my friends keep nagging me about their WIndows woes.
I am taking what you are saying at face value, you should consider yourself extremely lucky, in my empirical experience WIndows is a complete ass when it comes to maintenance.
I have been to Africa (Namibia, South Africa) and have seen the effects that unfair competition is having in African farmers.
It is killing the bussiness of the few farmers that managed to get capital to invest on their farms.
If this was fair competition I would say they have to suck it up and deal with it, but the immorality of it all is not justifiable in the terms you explain it.
Several African countries were perfectly self sufficient and the farms were providing badly needed employment. Unfair agricultural subsidies are only creating a dependency that was not there, very handy in term of geopolitical dominance and appeasing a vocal minority of voters back in Western developped countries, disastrous for the economic independence of African nations.
A safari in any African country (I recommend Etosha in Namibia) would put to rest these silly ideas of yours.
Or you could read a book about Africa, human evolution and watch a few doumentaries about African wildlife. Hint: no animals are ever eating fruits, not even the chimps (ok, they do some times).
Most modern antropologists think that we came from Africa (earlier species went out of Africa and evolved elsewhere until they reached extinction, our branch evolved in Africa to finally spread to Europe and elsewhere).
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody can be a musician!
That is the heritage of the XXth century, art was opened to everybody.
So the people in primitive tribes that sing and cal all night are not making music because they have got no training?
Is the guy tha picked up a muscial instrument and learned to play it "by ear", is not a musician because he did not receive training?
Oh boy, what a gloom view of the world, where in order to create music you need training.
If you had a modicum of musical education you would know that people like Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhaussen, Mario Lavista, Steve Reich and many others (just to name a few) liberated music from the restrictions of using a limited set of artifacts.
This "contorversy" has shown so many times during the history of music that ia a non issue for anybody curious enough to lear about it. The piano, the electronic keyboard, the sax, were all at one time or another derided as bastardizations of real musical instruments. I am sure you would have been there gleefully plotting for the demise of these instruments if you had lived in those days.
If you can combine sounds using any techniques you want, you are a musician.
That does not mean I have to like what you do, in all likelyhood what you do will be crap, but the creative act of arranging sounds in porpouse with a aesthetic porpouse is to make music.
Most composers rehash ideas many times, these ideas are longer than most people appreciate.
Vivaldi? Mozart? Beethoven? Wagner? Stravinsky? Shostakovich? The Beattles? You name it.
You may think they deal with smaller musical blocks, but that is because you are not a composer or maybe even a musician.
Trained musicians see bigger blocks as coherent entities, composers even more so. Most musical pieces, even very long ones, will gravitate around 3 or 4 basic idease that are developped at nauseam.
Outstanding example of this is the fugue that in principle uses one musical idea (which can be quite long) for a piece that may last many minutes. Musicians will discover that idea and treat it as a unique musical thought where novices would be struggling to make head from toes embroiled on the details.
What do the iTunes fan boys get on exchange for they hard earned cash?
A series of magnetics marks in a hard disk that can be interpreted as music.
In reality they get nothing. Once they "buy" this music they can't trade it, share it ( and here I mean share it in the sense you share a vinyl or CD: to your hearts content if so you wish), give it as a gift.
So they have been convinced that they have to pay money for thin air. Whoa, what an accomplishment.
May it be that people using othe players realize the big con that selling music in electronic form is?
Music is a communal human experience, it is not a comodity that you can pack and sell.
While the music industry provided some service ( a CD, and object you own) there was a point about buying music, but now that anything they have to offer is nothing and the promise to sue you if you copy that nothingness most peopl (except Apple fanboys and girls) realize that this is a scam.
If anything, such a poll shows how gullible Apple fans are (hey, they paid through the nose all these years for machines marginally better than most people's IBM compat PCs, so no surprise there).
"musician: One who composes, conducts, or performs music, especially instrumental music".
The above does not define music (why an instrumental musician is more musician than a singer, is beyond me).
So using the same piss poor reference you are using, I found the following: "music: The art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre".
Allowing for this crap defintion (a group of drums tunned to the same note have no melody or harmony strictly speaking, only rythm and of course a timbre) the important bit is this:
Arranging sounds on time.
That is it.
Mixers do exactly that.
If you can be bothered buy "Different trains" by Steve Reich and educate yourself about what mixing can accomplish.
I am a trained classical musician.
Most pop music does nothing for me, I find it boring and repetitive.
But I can recognize a musician when I hear one. If you think mixing does not require musical talent you obviously don't know what it means to create sounds using any technique whatsoever.
The musicians you so despectively call mixers are using techniques I can only dream to begin to understand (I can understand Stravinsky, John Cage or even more bizarre musicians that in general follow the western classical tradition). The music they do, although boring and yes, repetitive, sometimes shows some real creativity ant musical talent.
So no worries, we musicians can recognize our own kind, no need of closed minded slashbots to point them out to us.
You are an old fart. Most people here have no idea what that is :-)
.... then you need to learn a shell language and the OS utilities.
I would suggest you learn sh (Bourne Shell) first, since it is the most basic of them, is found in all UNIX or UNIX like OSes, and many modern ones are derived from it (in some systems is the shell used by default when you try to start an script).
Once you are comfortable with that try ksh or bash (but this one only if you have to). They are more versatile and adhere pretty much to sh's basic syntaxis.
I mean, if he is keeping his job.
Nowadays you design a service, and a service must include measures to ensure redundancy.
Or what was the plan? Deploy a single machine and hope for the best?
If the application was a game server for children in a kindergarten, well, it may not be critical.
But for more serious businesses or organizations of any kind, to ignore redundancy from the design phase and during testing, is simply a capital sin, especially now that hardware is cheap. The least one can do is using some virtualization software (like Vmware or similar) where you have an identical virtual system in an underutilized alternative machine.
But frankly now hardware is such small percentage of the cost of most projects that not to build redundancy from the start should be a sackable offense. If you are in a place where they can't afford expensive machines you can get very capable ones 2nd hand, at least in order to avoid this stupid oh my good I'll be fucked.
If you are for lack of hardware you deserve to be.
You (US) have zero uranium for practical purposes.
Certainly Canada and Australia will provide for you, but the other half of Uranium is in such promising places like Niger, Namibia, Uzbekistan, Kazhakstan and Russia.
Of course that is immaterial, nuclear power is uneconomical, companies providing nuclear power do so thanks to generous subsidies. These white elephants are bankrupt everywhere and almost bankrupted the French goverment, in the medium term uranium will not last long anyway, so we are just postponing the inevitable by a few years.
The only rational solution is to use less energy, and the energy we use has to come from renewable sources.
Any other solution based on mining something is basically wasting everybody's time.
Thank your good star if you abuse your eyes and have no problems.
The scientific body of evidence is overwhelming regarding the ill effect of spending too long in front of computer screens without taking any measures to ensure your vision is ok.
They did not redefine cinema in any way, they were very enjoyable movies, but ginema did not change dramatically in any way after those movies came along.
I you want a classic look for Metropolis, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Ragging Bull or Pulp Fiction.
What is the credibility of MS's Linux Lab when benchmarking Linux vs Windows?
In a scale of 1 to 10 I would say -1.
Honestly guys, keep the results to yourselves, and all the best for you. To publish them is a no win situation. If you say Windows is better in any measure it will be pointed out, rightly, that you are an interested party. If you find that Linux is better, well, I would like to see the day you plublish that. Most likely that will be quietly ignored.
So what is the frigging point exactly?
Because taboos are mostly irrational attitudes, the ways each culture chooses to be irrational are different and varied.
That is not to say that some taboos may not be rooted in some practical fact, but more often than not they are nonsense.
So, what would be the difference exactly?
I will tell you what. With Linux you become owner of your infrastructure. Once you have the dosh to move to commercially supported versions the migration is far less painful, not to mention that you always know that your data is accessible and protected agianst the whims of a coporate concern.
One of the best movies ever.
If you can rent it in your system you may have a point.
If not, well, you are just boasting about your paltry, limited, boring, corporate feed, cable suscription.
.... allows you to browse the Internet using WiFi...
He plugged his PC to the Interenet using 8Mb broadband and, naively, did not take any security measures.
He did this for 3 days until for administrative reasons, his broadband access was cancelled.
A few days later he signed on for a new broadband connection with a different company and, thankfully for him as things turned out, the connection did not work.
He asked for my help and after 10 minutes I plugged his computer to the net.
A couple of minutes later we began to get pop-ups and realizing the machine was not protected I started ana analysis that revealed in excess of 40 different viruses and trojans, modifications of all kind to the registry and phising tampering with the hosts and lmhosts files in order to redirect unsuspectng people to phising websites.
After several hours of work with this machine (what, did you think my friend knew how to keep his machine up to date? Patched? Protected? And virus free? No way, he is a salesperon, not a geek) he asked me if there was anything he could do to be more resilient agains malware.
I had installed an antivirus, firewall and NATed his broadband access with a spare box, so I explained to him what I have done. He dimsayed, commented there should be a better way. At this point I mentioned Apple and Linux.
This guy, that know nothing about computing, was begging for a secure, user friendly solution. He needs very little office software: edit the odd text document, spreadsheet, anything else is perfectly catered by any OS you care to mention (Solaris, BSD, etc).
As for games, well, buy a console, you could use the same screen for your cheap computer and the games console.
I still believe most home computer users fit this profile very closely. If no company has tried to cater to them it is because all the anticompetitive practices of MS that has made this impractical for anybody. Where the only obstacle for MS complete dominance (government intervention) has been raised, the people at Redmond come very quickly with a cheap version of Windows. That is a testament to the amount of money they are getting out of their illegal handling of the monopolistic position they achieved.
If Google would have a stab at this they have a huge market to tap. And equally important, they have a recognized brand name people trust.
If there is anybody that could challenge the dominance of MS in the home computing area that is Google.
"User friendliness" is a completely subjective concept, and is, unsurprisingly, in the eye on the beholder. It is a combination of a bit of good design and a lot of time invested to learn a certain way to do things.
What many people mean in the context of computer graphical interfaces as "user friendly" is the interface they know best, which given the monopolic nature of desktop computing, we know exactly what that means: something is not user friendly if it does not ape Windows.
Any normal person trained to use Linux will find it as the pinnacle of user firendliness because the user would know nothing else. And this is a valid point, but it is not unsourmountable or set in stone.
When the freedom of you or your organization to choose the software you use is under threat, user friendliness should take a back seat IMHO, because it is something you can address once you have secured the acces to your data and the control of your software infrastructure.
That is why most companies have huge teams of WIndows monkeys: because the machines do not need any maintenance.
Putting modesty aside, Linux and UNIX types can manage 3 times the amount of machines an equally sized team of WIndows guys.
Linux and UNIX are immensily easier to mantain and rearely let you down once they are set up properly.
Relying on Windows is a completely false sense of economy. All the Linux machines that my relatives and friends have at my instigation need little maintenance, and when they do it can be done easily remotely or with scripts.
In dire contrast teh few friends that still dare to call themsleves my friends keep nagging me about their WIndows woes.
I am taking what you are saying at face value, you should consider yourself extremely lucky, in my empirical experience WIndows is a complete ass when it comes to maintenance.
I have been to Africa (Namibia, South Africa) and have seen the effects that unfair competition is having in African farmers.
It is killing the bussiness of the few farmers that managed to get capital to invest on their farms.
If this was fair competition I would say they have to suck it up and deal with it, but the immorality of it all is not justifiable in the terms you explain it.
Several African countries were perfectly self sufficient and the farms were providing badly needed employment. Unfair agricultural subsidies are only creating a dependency that was not there, very handy in term of geopolitical dominance and appeasing a vocal minority of voters back in Western developped countries, disastrous for the economic independence of African nations.
A safari in any African country (I recommend Etosha in Namibia) would put to rest these silly ideas of yours.
Or you could read a book about Africa, human evolution and watch a few doumentaries about African wildlife. Hint: no animals are ever eating fruits, not even the chimps (ok, they do some times).
The strongest evidence supporting our species' African origins comes actually from South Africa.
Please review your data about this.
Most modern antropologists think that we came from Africa (earlier species went out of Africa and evolved elsewhere until they reached extinction, our branch evolved in Africa to finally spread to Europe and elsewhere).