I've uniquified my email address for every web site I've signed up with over the last several years, and none of them have led to spam. None.
It's all from a couple of ancient Usenet posts, and the time that a couple of acquaintances posted my address on their web sites, until I discovered it and asked them not to.
Maybe there are unscrupulous web sites out there, but if so, they must be a tiny tiny percentage. As a source of spam, they're insignificant.
Not if Windows 2000 is already installed. The sort of people I'm talking about have never installed an OS themselves, and would need overwhelming reasons to do so. (In fact, the two I most have in mind are still running Windows 98, coz that's what came with the machines.)
Instructions clearly posted on the GnuCash site led me to their IRC channel.
Fair enough; that's a clear direction. But if it means finding, installing, and setting up a new app (even if they know what IRC is), then many new users won't bother.
Take the case of Mac OS X. In most cases, installing a new app looks like this:
Download archive or disk image
Open it to reveal app
Drag app into/Applications, or to anywhere on HD
That's all there is to it! Four mouse clicks, and a few seconds. A few cases involve running an installer app, but that's just as easy. Compare those to the Unix app I installed recently, which involved battling through umpteen levels of fink dependencies, configurations, &c. Took several hours to download and compile, and this was just a simple app without a GUI! (I'm sure that they're not all like that. But why aren't they all as simple as the Mac OS X case?)
Before Microsoft had their monopoly, an Office suite wouldn't have been the deal-breaker like it is now.
Oh, quite. I'm not saying any of this is right or good, just that it's the way things are, and it's something the whole Linux environment will have to address if it wants to attract these sorts of users.
The first time my wife sat down in front of a computer running Linux...
...she was using one that had already been installed and set up with the sort of software she might use, with the right network and ISP settings, &c. (And I'm sure it didn't hurt having a comforting presence beside her, too.)
A new user, confronted with installing a distro, choosing suitable software from the tons available, installing it, and setting it up, might find things a little different.
My own experience with free software culture shows that people want to help and are willing to help. I sat on an irc channel...
Again, you're using knowledge that the uninitiated simply don't have. I've never used IRC, and I'm far from new to all this. How do you know where to look for help? How do you find all these helpful people?
There's not a single place where Windows is superior to Linux.
There is at least one: M$ Office. I hate to say it, coz I know that other office packages have done a huge amount of work and are better in some ways, but I know many people who need to be able to read and write Office files, without worrying that obscure bits of formatting will be lost or that they won't be able to send files back. Rightly or wrongly, this is the main show-stopper, without which they simply won't consider anything else. If/when Linux is seen to provide a seamless, transparent, drop-in replacement for Office, it stands to gain a lot more users.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a Linux user myself. Mac OS X for me; an example of a real standard and consistent interface.)
I have a feeling once there is a native office suite for the Mac, most likely Open Office, but others are in the works, Microsoft will, again, pack up it's toys and slink back to the Intel platform only.
I agree, but for different reasons. It may be nice to anthropomorphise M$ and imagine them sulking, but I suspect the real reason is that they only provide Office for Mac because otherwise would leave them open to far worse monopoly charges. I think they provided Mac IE for the same reason. Once there was another good browser, they didn't need to spend the time and effort. I'm not saying whether it's a good or moral decision, just that I think it's a sound business decision rather than mere sour grapes.
Several plot changes and additions bug me: the appearance of elves during Helm's Deep instead of ents afterwards, for example. Just about everything involving Arwen in all 3 movies. Ent hastiness. All that stuff at Osgiliath in TTT. Aragorn's death/rebirth. Gandalf becoming a Zen Buddhist. The very scary lighthouse...
The omissions -- Crickhollow/the Old Forest/Bombadil/the Barrow Wights, much of the Council, whichever bits of Faramir's/Eowyn's/Saruman's stories don't appear in ROTK EE, the return journey and the Scouring of the Shire -- I find easier to handle, though they're all unfortunate to some degree.
But for me the single most enduring irritations are the occasional bits of stupid dialogue. You know, the crass, cringeworthy substitution of Tolkien's masterful language with dumbed-down inanities of the "Let's hunt some orc!" <wince> variety. The dwarf-tossing references, and "Nobody likes you!" pulp fare. There are only a handful of these, but they spoil a disproportionate amount of the movie...
(That said, almost everything in the movies is closer to the spirit of the book than we had any right to hope, and any expectation of putting onto film. They're a magnificent achievement, if an imperfect one.)
That's a different problem: that of multiple, conflicting standards. Written English isn't just one language: there are two major language groups (British/Commonwealth and American -- and probably many variants within and across those as well). Both are largely standardised; some cases are depend on personal choice (such as 'focused'/'focussed', and '-ise'/'-ize' in British English), but most spellings have a single 'correct' form.
But the main problem today is that people aren't following any of those standards! Whether we're talking of minor typos, common misspellings ('rediculous' &c), or the complete lack of any order or at all (some postings here...), far too few web pages and posts use English that anyone would recognise.
I find it interesting that those for whom English is a second language generally use it fairly well. Many continental Europeans, for example, put us to shame, rivalling the best native speakers in spelling, grammar, idiom, and other aspects. It's those whose first (and often only) language is English who mistreat it most grievously!
What depresses me most isn't ignorance so much as wilful ignorance. No-one knows the spelling of every word in the language, or makes no grammatical mistakes or typos. But everyone can improve, can spot where they go wrong and learn from their mistakes. However, too few seem to be doing so...
Good English matters. You can't always say "But you knew what I meant." -- Firstly, you're making it much harder for people to know what you meant; often, they won't make the effort. Computers, search engines and the like often don't know what you meant. People may know what you meant but infer unfortunate things about your education and intellect anyway. People still learning English (youngsters or foreigners) may learn the wrong lessons from your bad example. And, maybe most importantly, people often don't know what you meant, or think they do while completely misunderstanding you.
Luckily, quite a few people seem to agree with me -- as evidenced by the unexpected runaway success here in the UK of a book named after an old joke, in which a single misplaced comma completely changes the meaning: Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
(Posted on behalf of CaRP, the Campaign for Real Pedantry.)
As for the problem of MIDI not being able to... produce sheet music - who cares?
Er... anyone who wants to produce sheet music?
Seriously, what was your point? We're discussing a music notation document type here - RTFA. And manuscript is the standard way to notate music, one that goes back hundreds of years, and that hundreds of thousands of people use right now. MIDI is a (very good) solution to a completely different problem, that of controlling synthesisers - it's been extended into other forms of performance and sequencing, but it's completely unsuited to music notation: see my other comment here for why.
MIDI is bad because it doesn't really tell you anything about how the notation should appear.
And you ain't just whistlin' Dix... Er, yes, indeed.
To be more specific: MIDI doesn't tell you what clefs and key signature(s) to use. It can't hold slurs or phrasing, accents, articulations, breath marks, or other note symbols. It has no way to represent repeat marks, first/second/third-time bars, 'da capo', 'dal segno', or 'coda' directions. It can't control note grouping or splitting, stem direction, use of accidentals. It has trouble mixing parts on the same stave (e.g. complex piano notation). There's no standard for grace notes, cue notes, arpeggios, ornaments, tremolos; no agreed values for dynamic levels or changes. Lyrics cause major problems - even if you use the.kar extension, how do you put multiple sets of words for different voices? Or different verses? There's always a need for other text, too - tempo and style markings, instructions for voices to split, or strings to play near the bridge, or brass to use mutes, or a hundred others. And of course multi-instrument scores are far worse: how do you group certain staves together? How do you show instruments entering or leaving part-way through (common for vocal music)? How do you tell when to use multi-bar rests, or section letters? And that's before we get onto page-layout issues such as title/author/composer/copyright/&c lines, and where to break lines and pages (which no package gets right on its own, and I always end up having to do myself)...
Is that enough to be going on with?:)
MIDI may (for keyboard pieces) give a reasonable description of what one particular performance may sound like, but manuscript is far more than that, telling how to create other performances under other conditions. It tells you the composer's intent in a way that sound or note data simply can't.
AAC is an audio compression format. No more, no less. It's the audio layer from MPEG-4, in fact, and is just as open as MP3. You can rip/convert to and from AAC with no restrictions. (It's not Apple's format: they didn't create it and don't control it -- anyone can license the format and build it into any player; Apple are just another user.)
In particular, AAC itself is unencrypted. No DRM.
What the iTunes Music Store sells are.m4p files: AAC files that have been wrapped in a FairPlay encryption layer. It's FairPlay that stops you playing on other machines &c.
To summarise:
AAC = audio compression
FairPlay = DRM
iTunes = application
iTunes Music Store = web site
me = annoyed with having to keep repeating this stuff
I think singing with little or no vibrato is under-rated. As a performer, I can't say I find it any more tiring to do, and I very much like the sound, especially in choral works. I don't know whether my liking for early music (early baroque, Renaissance, and late mediaeval) is connected with my appreciation of that sound -- or vice versa -- but I do prefer that purity of tone and harmony.
Small labels are just as capable of recording, producing, packaging and (to a lesser extent) distributing music as the RIAA.
Yes, but unfortunately success doesn't just depend on those things. The important thing, and as far as I can see the RIAA's main function, is promotion. Marketing. Advertising. Letting people know about the music, and making them want it.
Many (most?) people don't buy music for the music. They think they do, but they really buy it for the image, for the coolness value, for the name on the front, for what their friends will think. They buy it to identify with artist, the genre, the other people listening to it. They buy it for the memories it evokes (whether of that party a fortnight ago, or of their schooldays decades past). They buy it to fit in, to be different, or for comfort and familiarity.
Just look at the charts, at the music shops, at the TV and radio programmes and advertisements plugging new releases and greatest hits packages...
And small labels can't do anything about this. They can't fight the huge marketing machine that the RIAA represents. Their only hope is to make good music and hope that word gets around, because good music is something the RIAA doesn't has little incentive to make.
While we're at it, a couple of small labels making music I like are Groove Unlimited and Neu Harmony. Both are well worth supporting.
They're a public company, they have to defend their bottom line to their shareholders.
Yes; they also have to obey the law. They've been found guilty of illegal activity on many occasions. Or should 'shareholder value' trump that, too?
I am somewhat bothered by the fact that you consider them evil for simply accomplishing what every company tries to do.
I don't - that was my main point! I consider them evil for the means they use to get to that position and to stay there.
MS gets slagged off a lot here, and a lot of it is ill-thought-out, unjustified, knee-jerk response. I want people to think about the situation, to form an opinion and know why they hold the attitudes they do. As you say, it's not necessarily wrong to hold a dominant market position; other companies have done so such a way that their customers, shareholder, and even competitors all benefit. But I think there are good reasons to think ill of MS, and I want people to hold informed opinions.
No, it's not flamebait (well, not to me, anyway), just wrong:)
I do not use Linux but is it interoperable with everything?
I'm not just thinking of Linux here (I don't even use it myself), but of their general principles. Open Source software, by its nature, makes file formats and protocols available; and in most cases, those interfaces tend to be fairly stable, designed not to favour particular implementations, and . Most open source projects do NOT attempt to make their interfaces as hard to figure out as possible; they don't change them frequently for no good reason; they don't slap patents on them. Microsoft does all of those things, and more, to prevent interoperability.
they are just like every other company out there
Take one simple example: Microsoft builds a protocol called CIFS to let Windows machines share files &c. They change it needlessly; they obfuscate it; they threaten legal action; they do everything they can to prevent Samba from using the protocol. Apple builds a protocol called ZeroConf (aka Rendezvous) to let machines share files &c. They make the protocol open, providing documentation and an open-sourced reference implementation, not just allowing but doing all they can to encourage interoperability.
So no, not all companies behave as maliciously as Microsoft. That sort of behaviour is neither desirable nor necessary for success.
Microsoft, who has de facto dominance over the desktop, and thus are evil according to the tinfoil-crowd
No, they're not evil because they dominate the desktop.
They are evil because they use that monopoly unfairly, to illegally (attempt to) dominate other areas. They are evil because of their unethical and illegal business practices: buying out or crushing all competition, secret agreements with vendors, spreading lies, putting profits over user experience and security, doing their utmost to prevent interoperability with other software and systems, continually breaking the spirit and the letter of anti-trust agreements, and much more.
Microsoft are evil, not because they dominate the desktop, but because, thanks to them, most people (think they) have no alternative.
The theory for high sample rates (AIUI) is that they allow much gentler filtering, giving less distortion in the audible range.
Standard CDs are sampled at 44.1Khz, so the highest frequency they could possibly store is a sound at 22.05kHz. However, this doesn't meant that they will reproduce anything less than that with perfect accuracy. Firstly, the sound needs to be filtered to prevent anything over 22.05kHz hitting the convertors (as they'd cause very nasty artefacts); this filtering has a lower cut-off (usually around 20kHz) for safety, and although the filter has a steep response, it's not infinite; it'll reduce some lower frequencies too, and it'll also cause phase changes at lower frequencies. (I gather current filters are much better than those used for early CDs, which were responsible for much of the early complaints.) Filters are also needed in the player, which also affect the sound.
Greater sample rates would allow much gentler filters to be used, which would have less (or no) effect on audible frequencies, even those above 20kHz.
Secondly, it's claimed that although we can't hear sound at those higher frequencies, we can detect phase changes and timing changes occurring faster than CD can store; the additional timing resolution would help with that.
And thirdly, in the studio (and wherever sound is processed) the tiny changes caused by filtering and slight timing shifts can add up, to the point (it's claimed) where they can have a very audible result. The extra frequency and time resolution, just like the extra sample resolution of 24 or 32 bits, allows mixing and other processing to be done with less loss.
So there are reasons why 96kHz or 192kHz and 24- or 32-bit sound might provide real benefits. I'm unlikely to hear them myself -- I'm a musician, not an audiophile or sound engineer -- but as technology gets more powerful, faster, and cheaper, I'm sure sound quality will only improve.
(If the RIAA doesn't stop it... Oops, a little bit of politics there, yes indeed.)
Am I missing the point, or is analogue sound output a red herring here? ISTM that computers should have a digital output (optical or coax or whatever), which would obviate these sorts of problems. You could then use your own separate DAC if you needed an analogue signal, or connect directly to an amp or other bit of hi-fi gear.
(You could have an analogue output as well, of course, but if you were using that in preference to the digital one, then you wouldn't be worrying about sound quality anyway.)
Okay, many folks seem to be saying that this game is the online equivalent of a 'private place', in which case the owner's rules apply.
Fair enough; sounds logical.
But the net seems to blur the distinction between 'public' and 'private' places. Many of us have to pay just to connect to the net, so it's not as simple as saying that if you pay, it's private.
In the Real World(tm), another distinction between public and private places is size; private places are by their nature limited in their area/volume and in the number of people they can take. Again, this doesn't necessarily apply online.
A related issue is that of control. In a Real World(tm) private place, you'd expect the owner to be able to exercise control over visitors; online, that may be impossible due to sheer numbers.
So - the boundaries blur. Places online can be technically private (according to current standards) but exhibit many of the qualities we currently associate with public places. Should we lose the benefits that would give, or should we say that once a site (or whatever) gets large enough, once it has enough visitors/participants, once the owner loses a certain degree of control, then it counts as a public place, and be treated accordingly?
And if so, where do you draw the line? Is it possible to draw such lines at all?
What I probably meant (and this was a few weeks ago, so blame my memory) was that fink itself installed directly, but then it spent ages finding, downloading, and compiling all the packages lilypond needs: 90 in all, as it turns out -- some for fink itself, some virtual ones representing bits of Darwin, stuff for compression and text manipulation and other misc utils, the 'guile' Scheme interpreter, Python, TeX, teTeX, and lots of XFree86 stuff as well!
Anyway, writing that message prompted me to have another bash at it, and I've just got it working. (I think the problem was that although I wanted to try the latest stable version of LilyPond, I had to persuade fink to look at unstable packages - once I'd done that it found a more recent version of LilyPond which compiled okay. Eventually.)
Having to install 1.1GB of stuff to run one simple application -- and a text-only one at that! -- does seem a little excessive... But I guess that's the price we pay for running something far better than X Windows...
Anyway, it's running fine, producing some rather nice-looking PDF files from my first attempts, as expected -- more natural, more musical than Cubase did without lots of tweaking -- so I guess I'll be spending some time learning it. Its input format might be a bit much for non-techies, but it's not essential as there are converters from MIDI, Finale, ABC, and other formats. (OTOH, I'm a techie, and I've already used a music language before -- AMPLE on the good old BBC Micro -- so I think I'll cope.)
no good movies made from good novels??? Lord of the Rings *trilogy*...
Yes, and look how much was cut. How many plot lines were drastically edited or removed. How many characters were elided or removed. How many long scenes and events were reduced to a fraction* or removed entirely. For example:
Most of Bilbo's party and speech
Much of Gandalf's conversation with Frodo at Bag end (though some of this material is shown briefly elsewhere)
Frodo's move to Crickhollow
Farmer Maggot
The Old Forest
Tom Bombadil
The barrow wights
Glorfindel
Most of The Council of Elrond (though again some of the material is shown briefly elsewhere)
Much of the Ent storyline and their appearance at Helm's Deep
The parley at Orthanc
Aragorn's use of the Orthanc palantir
Elrond's two sons
The Dunedain
The Wild Men
Denethor's descent
Much of Frodo and Sam's time in Mordor; their capture by orcs &c
Prince Imrahil
The Houses of Healing; many other scenes with Faramir, Eowyn and Eomer
The Mouth of Sauron
Aragorn & Arwen's wedding; Theoden's funeral
Most of the hobbits' return journey, especially the long period at Rivendell
The Scouring of the Shire, the Battle of Bywater, and events there over the following year such as Frodo and later Sam becoming mayors
and loads more. (It's possible a couple of these may appear briefly in the third Extended Edition, but even counting each 4-hour-plus EE -- far more than a normal film is allowed -- there's still a lot missing.)
Don't get me wrong: I think the films are a magnificent achievement. It's a good adaptation, one which (despite a few crass moments, much simplification, and some unnecessary changes) clearly has a lot of respect for the book, and gets closer to it than most expected, packing in much more of the events, history, background and atmosphere (albeit often obliquely) than you would have thought possible.
But even with that budget, that amount of time to tell the story, and with that care and love spent in the adaptation, an awful lot ended up in the bin. As arth1 said, there's simply not enough time in a movie. And few adaptations are anywhere near as good as this one.
[* I didn't say 'decimated' as that means removing a tenth and leaving 9/10ths, not the other way around, of course...]
I do all my sequencing and notation work in Cubase, because that's what I've always used, and I have an investment in it. I did look at the demo of Finale for a short while, but my impression was that although it made simple things easier, I had real trouble doing anything more complex (e.g. cross-rhythms on the same stave). So although Cubase's score module is a pain to use and needs a lot of tweaking, I've stuck with it. Has anyone else used both - is my impression fair?
Also, has anyone got LilyPond working on OS X 10.2(.8)? It looks like an interesting idea -- completely automated notation, done right so that it doesn't need any tweaking, with no GUI and input from a text file (with optional translation from MIDI files &c) -- but installation was a pig. It needs fink, so after spending 800MB of my HD and many hours downloading and compiling that, I try LilyPond and get a compiler error! I don't have time right now to try to find out why...
Slashdot Mirror
I've uniquified my email address for every web site I've signed up with over the last several years, and none of them have led to spam. None.
It's all from a couple of ancient Usenet posts, and the time that a couple of acquaintances posted my address on their web sites, until I discovered it and asked them not to.
Maybe there are unscrupulous web sites out there, but if so, they must be a tiny tiny percentage. As a source of spam, they're insignificant.
Not if Windows 2000 is already installed. The sort of people I'm talking about have never installed an OS themselves, and would need overwhelming reasons to do so. (In fact, the two I most have in mind are still running Windows 98, coz that's what came with the machines.)
Instructions clearly posted on the GnuCash site led me to their IRC channel.
Fair enough; that's a clear direction. But if it means finding, installing, and setting up a new app (even if they know what IRC is), then many new users won't bother.
Take the case of Mac OS X. In most cases, installing a new app looks like this:
- Download archive or disk image
- Open it to reveal app
- Drag app into
/Applications, or to anywhere on HD
That's all there is to it! Four mouse clicks, and a few seconds. A few cases involve running an installer app, but that's just as easy. Compare those to the Unix app I installed recently, which involved battling through umpteen levels of fink dependencies, configurations, &c. Took several hours to download and compile, and this was just a simple app without a GUI! (I'm sure that they're not all like that. But why aren't they all as simple as the Mac OS X case?)Before Microsoft had their monopoly, an Office suite wouldn't have been the deal-breaker like it is now.
Oh, quite. I'm not saying any of this is right or good, just that it's the way things are, and it's something the whole Linux environment will have to address if it wants to attract these sorts of users.
The first time my wife sat down in front of a computer running Linux...
A new user, confronted with installing a distro, choosing suitable software from the tons available, installing it, and setting it up, might find things a little different.
My own experience with free software culture shows that people want to help and are willing to help. I sat on an irc channel...
Again, you're using knowledge that the uninitiated simply don't have. I've never used IRC, and I'm far from new to all this. How do you know where to look for help? How do you find all these helpful people?
There's not a single place where Windows is superior to Linux.
There is at least one: M$ Office. I hate to say it, coz I know that other office packages have done a huge amount of work and are better in some ways, but I know many people who need to be able to read and write Office files, without worrying that obscure bits of formatting will be lost or that they won't be able to send files back. Rightly or wrongly, this is the main show-stopper, without which they simply won't consider anything else. If/when Linux is seen to provide a seamless, transparent, drop-in replacement for Office, it stands to gain a lot more users.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a Linux user myself. Mac OS X for me; an example of a real standard and consistent interface.)
I agree, but for different reasons. It may be nice to anthropomorphise M$ and imagine them sulking, but I suspect the real reason is that they only provide Office for Mac because otherwise would leave them open to far worse monopoly charges. I think they provided Mac IE for the same reason. Once there was another good browser, they didn't need to spend the time and effort. I'm not saying whether it's a good or moral decision, just that I think it's a sound business decision rather than mere sour grapes.
The omissions -- Crickhollow/the Old Forest/Bombadil/the Barrow Wights, much of the Council, whichever bits of Faramir's/Eowyn's/Saruman's stories don't appear in ROTK EE, the return journey and the Scouring of the Shire -- I find easier to handle, though they're all unfortunate to some degree.
But for me the single most enduring irritations are the occasional bits of stupid dialogue. You know, the crass, cringeworthy substitution of Tolkien's masterful language with dumbed-down inanities of the "Let's hunt some orc!" <wince> variety. The dwarf-tossing references, and "Nobody likes you!" pulp fare. There are only a handful of these, but they spoil a disproportionate amount of the movie...
(That said, almost everything in the movies is closer to the spirit of the book than we had any right to hope, and any expectation of putting onto film. They're a magnificent achievement, if an imperfect one.)
All problems in Computer Science can be solved by looking here?
But the main problem today is that people aren't following any of those standards! Whether we're talking of minor typos, common misspellings ('rediculous' &c), or the complete lack of any order or at all (some postings here...), far too few web pages and posts use English that anyone would recognise.
I find it interesting that those for whom English is a second language generally use it fairly well. Many continental Europeans, for example, put us to shame, rivalling the best native speakers in spelling, grammar, idiom, and other aspects. It's those whose first (and often only) language is English who mistreat it most grievously!
What depresses me most isn't ignorance so much as wilful ignorance. No-one knows the spelling of every word in the language, or makes no grammatical mistakes or typos. But everyone can improve, can spot where they go wrong and learn from their mistakes. However, too few seem to be doing so...
Good English matters. You can't always say "But you knew what I meant." -- Firstly, you're making it much harder for people to know what you meant; often, they won't make the effort. Computers, search engines and the like often don't know what you meant. People may know what you meant but infer unfortunate things about your education and intellect anyway. People still learning English (youngsters or foreigners) may learn the wrong lessons from your bad example. And, maybe most importantly, people often don't know what you meant, or think they do while completely misunderstanding you.
Luckily, quite a few people seem to agree with me -- as evidenced by the unexpected runaway success here in the UK of a book named after an old joke, in which a single misplaced comma completely changes the meaning: Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves .
(Posted on behalf of CaRP, the Campaign for Real Pedantry.)
Er... anyone who wants to produce sheet music?
Seriously, what was your point? We're discussing a music notation document type here - RTFA. And manuscript is the standard way to notate music, one that goes back hundreds of years, and that hundreds of thousands of people use right now. MIDI is a (very good) solution to a completely different problem, that of controlling synthesisers - it's been extended into other forms of performance and sequencing, but it's completely unsuited to music notation: see my other comment here for why.
And you ain't just whistlin' Dix... Er, yes, indeed.
To be more specific: MIDI doesn't tell you what clefs and key signature(s) to use. It can't hold slurs or phrasing, accents, articulations, breath marks, or other note symbols. It has no way to represent repeat marks, first/second/third-time bars, 'da capo', 'dal segno', or 'coda' directions. It can't control note grouping or splitting, stem direction, use of accidentals. It has trouble mixing parts on the same stave (e.g. complex piano notation). There's no standard for grace notes, cue notes, arpeggios, ornaments, tremolos; no agreed values for dynamic levels or changes. Lyrics cause major problems - even if you use the .kar extension, how do you put multiple sets of words for different voices? Or different verses? There's always a need for other text, too - tempo and style markings, instructions for voices to split, or strings to play near the bridge, or brass to use mutes, or a hundred others. And of course multi-instrument scores are far worse: how do you group certain staves together? How do you show instruments entering or leaving part-way through (common for vocal music)? How do you tell when to use multi-bar rests, or section letters? And that's before we get onto page-layout issues such as title/author/composer/copyright/&c lines, and where to break lines and pages (which no package gets right on its own, and I always end up having to do myself)...
Is that enough to be going on with? :)
MIDI may (for keyboard pieces) give a reasonable description of what one particular performance may sound like, but manuscript is far more than that, telling how to create other performances under other conditions. It tells you the composer's intent in a way that sound or note data simply can't.
No, not even that.
AAC is an audio compression format. No more, no less. It's the audio layer from MPEG-4, in fact, and is just as open as MP3. You can rip/convert to and from AAC with no restrictions. (It's not Apple's format: they didn't create it and don't control it -- anyone can license the format and build it into any player; Apple are just another user.)
In particular, AAC itself is unencrypted. No DRM.
What the iTunes Music Store sells are .m4p files: AAC files that have been wrapped in a FairPlay encryption layer. It's FairPlay that stops you playing on other machines &c.
To summarise:
I think singing with little or no vibrato is under-rated. As a performer, I can't say I find it any more tiring to do, and I very much like the sound, especially in choral works. I don't know whether my liking for early music (early baroque, Renaissance, and late mediaeval) is connected with my appreciation of that sound -- or vice versa -- but I do prefer that purity of tone and harmony.
But that aside, if professionals like opera singers can all sing without vibrato, then why do they always use so flippin' much???
(And I say that as a classical music lover and trained singer...)
Yes, but unfortunately success doesn't just depend on those things. The important thing, and as far as I can see the RIAA's main function, is promotion. Marketing. Advertising. Letting people know about the music, and making them want it.
Many (most?) people don't buy music for the music. They think they do, but they really buy it for the image, for the coolness value, for the name on the front, for what their friends will think. They buy it to identify with artist, the genre, the other people listening to it. They buy it for the memories it evokes (whether of that party a fortnight ago, or of their schooldays decades past). They buy it to fit in, to be different, or for comfort and familiarity.
Just look at the charts, at the music shops, at the TV and radio programmes and advertisements plugging new releases and greatest hits packages...
And small labels can't do anything about this. They can't fight the huge marketing machine that the RIAA represents. Their only hope is to make good music and hope that word gets around, because good music is something the RIAA doesn't has little incentive to make.
While we're at it, a couple of small labels making music I like are Groove Unlimited and Neu Harmony. Both are well worth supporting.
Do you honestly think that that never happens? All it takes is for one person in ten thousand or so to click to make it worth their while...
Marry your own Emma!
(Sorry, sorry, I really should learn to resist a lame play on words...)
Yes; they also have to obey the law. They've been found guilty of illegal activity on many occasions. Or should 'shareholder value' trump that, too?
I am somewhat bothered by the fact that you consider them evil for simply accomplishing what every company tries to do.
I don't - that was my main point! I consider them evil for the means they use to get to that position and to stay there.
MS gets slagged off a lot here, and a lot of it is ill-thought-out, unjustified, knee-jerk response. I want people to think about the situation, to form an opinion and know why they hold the attitudes they do. As you say, it's not necessarily wrong to hold a dominant market position; other companies have done so such a way that their customers, shareholder, and even competitors all benefit. But I think there are good reasons to think ill of MS, and I want people to hold informed opinions.
I do not use Linux but is it interoperable with everything?
I'm not just thinking of Linux here (I don't even use it myself), but of their general principles. Open Source software, by its nature, makes file formats and protocols available; and in most cases, those interfaces tend to be fairly stable, designed not to favour particular implementations, and . Most open source projects do NOT attempt to make their interfaces as hard to figure out as possible; they don't change them frequently for no good reason; they don't slap patents on them. Microsoft does all of those things, and more, to prevent interoperability.
they are just like every other company out there
Take one simple example: Microsoft builds a protocol called CIFS to let Windows machines share files &c. They change it needlessly; they obfuscate it; they threaten legal action; they do everything they can to prevent Samba from using the protocol. Apple builds a protocol called ZeroConf (aka Rendezvous) to let machines share files &c. They make the protocol open, providing documentation and an open-sourced reference implementation, not just allowing but doing all they can to encourage interoperability.
So no, not all companies behave as maliciously as Microsoft. That sort of behaviour is neither desirable nor necessary for success.
No, they're not evil because they dominate the desktop.
They are evil because they use that monopoly unfairly, to illegally (attempt to) dominate other areas. They are evil because of their unethical and illegal business practices: buying out or crushing all competition, secret agreements with vendors, spreading lies, putting profits over user experience and security, doing their utmost to prevent interoperability with other software and systems, continually breaking the spirit and the letter of anti-trust agreements, and much more.
Microsoft are evil, not because they dominate the desktop, but because, thanks to them, most people (think they) have no alternative.
Standard CDs are sampled at 44.1Khz, so the highest frequency they could possibly store is a sound at 22.05kHz. However, this doesn't meant that they will reproduce anything less than that with perfect accuracy. Firstly, the sound needs to be filtered to prevent anything over 22.05kHz hitting the convertors (as they'd cause very nasty artefacts); this filtering has a lower cut-off (usually around 20kHz) for safety, and although the filter has a steep response, it's not infinite; it'll reduce some lower frequencies too, and it'll also cause phase changes at lower frequencies. (I gather current filters are much better than those used for early CDs, which were responsible for much of the early complaints.) Filters are also needed in the player, which also affect the sound.
Greater sample rates would allow much gentler filters to be used, which would have less (or no) effect on audible frequencies, even those above 20kHz.
Secondly, it's claimed that although we can't hear sound at those higher frequencies, we can detect phase changes and timing changes occurring faster than CD can store; the additional timing resolution would help with that.
And thirdly, in the studio (and wherever sound is processed) the tiny changes caused by filtering and slight timing shifts can add up, to the point (it's claimed) where they can have a very audible result. The extra frequency and time resolution, just like the extra sample resolution of 24 or 32 bits, allows mixing and other processing to be done with less loss.
So there are reasons why 96kHz or 192kHz and 24- or 32-bit sound might provide real benefits. I'm unlikely to hear them myself -- I'm a musician, not an audiophile or sound engineer -- but as technology gets more powerful, faster, and cheaper, I'm sure sound quality will only improve.
(If the RIAA doesn't stop it... Oops, a little bit of politics there, yes indeed.)
(You could have an analogue output as well, of course, but if you were using that in preference to the digital one, then you wouldn't be worrying about sound quality anyway.)
Fair enough; sounds logical.
But the net seems to blur the distinction between 'public' and 'private' places. Many of us have to pay just to connect to the net, so it's not as simple as saying that if you pay, it's private.
In the Real World(tm), another distinction between public and private places is size; private places are by their nature limited in their area/volume and in the number of people they can take. Again, this doesn't necessarily apply online.
A related issue is that of control. In a Real World(tm) private place, you'd expect the owner to be able to exercise control over visitors; online, that may be impossible due to sheer numbers.
So - the boundaries blur. Places online can be technically private (according to current standards) but exhibit many of the qualities we currently associate with public places. Should we lose the benefits that would give, or should we say that once a site (or whatever) gets large enough, once it has enough visitors/participants, once the owner loses a certain degree of control, then it counts as a public place, and be treated accordingly?
And if so, where do you draw the line? Is it possible to draw such lines at all?
Anyway, writing that message prompted me to have another bash at it, and I've just got it working. (I think the problem was that although I wanted to try the latest stable version of LilyPond, I had to persuade fink to look at unstable packages - once I'd done that it found a more recent version of LilyPond which compiled okay. Eventually.)
Having to install 1.1GB of stuff to run one simple application -- and a text-only one at that! -- does seem a little excessive... But I guess that's the price we pay for running something far better than X Windows...
Anyway, it's running fine, producing some rather nice-looking PDF files from my first attempts, as expected -- more natural, more musical than Cubase did without lots of tweaking -- so I guess I'll be spending some time learning it. Its input format might be a bit much for non-techies, but it's not essential as there are converters from MIDI, Finale, ABC, and other formats. (OTOH, I'm a techie, and I've already used a music language before -- AMPLE on the good old BBC Micro -- so I think I'll cope.)
I've seen neither of the first two episodes. And nothing I've heard here has given me the slightest cause to suspect I'm missing out on anything...
Yes, and look how much was cut. How many plot lines were drastically edited or removed. How many characters were elided or removed. How many long scenes and events were reduced to a fraction* or removed entirely. For example:
- Most of Bilbo's party and speech
- Much of Gandalf's conversation with Frodo at Bag end (though some of this material is shown briefly elsewhere)
- Frodo's move to Crickhollow
- Farmer Maggot
- The Old Forest
- Tom Bombadil
- The barrow wights
- Glorfindel
- Most of The Council of Elrond (though again some of the material is shown briefly elsewhere)
- Much of the Ent storyline and their appearance at Helm's Deep
- The parley at Orthanc
- Aragorn's use of the Orthanc palantir
- Elrond's two sons
- The Dunedain
- The Wild Men
- Denethor's descent
- Much of Frodo and Sam's time in Mordor; their capture by orcs &c
- Prince Imrahil
- The Houses of Healing; many other scenes with Faramir, Eowyn and Eomer
- The Mouth of Sauron
- Aragorn & Arwen's wedding; Theoden's funeral
- Most of the hobbits' return journey, especially the long period at Rivendell
- The Scouring of the Shire, the Battle of Bywater, and events there over the following year such as Frodo and later Sam becoming mayors
and loads more. (It's possible a couple of these may appear briefly in the third Extended Edition, but even counting each 4-hour-plus EE -- far more than a normal film is allowed -- there's still a lot missing.)Don't get me wrong: I think the films are a magnificent achievement. It's a good adaptation, one which (despite a few crass moments, much simplification, and some unnecessary changes) clearly has a lot of respect for the book, and gets closer to it than most expected, packing in much more of the events, history, background and atmosphere (albeit often obliquely) than you would have thought possible.
But even with that budget, that amount of time to tell the story, and with that care and love spent in the adaptation, an awful lot ended up in the bin. As arth1 said, there's simply not enough time in a movie. And few adaptations are anywhere near as good as this one.
[* I didn't say 'decimated' as that means removing a tenth and leaving 9/10ths, not the other way around, of course...]
Also, has anyone got LilyPond working on OS X 10.2(.8)? It looks like an interesting idea -- completely automated notation, done right so that it doesn't need any tweaking, with no GUI and input from a text file (with optional translation from MIDI files &c) -- but installation was a pig. It needs fink, so after spending 800MB of my HD and many hours downloading and compiling that, I try LilyPond and get a compiler error! I don't have time right now to try to find out why...