Unless someone's done something interesting with arrangements, the musicians playing the score for Les Mis have very little to no creative input in the music they're producing. They play what's on the score, and there's very little interaction between the cast and orchestra in a typical concert hall.
How is this different from a symphony concert? Everyone's playing what's on the stand in front of them, with little to no creative input.
The difference is in the performance itself - the performances are a little different from night to night, and a full orchestra that's paying attention to what's happening onstage will be able to compensate seamlessly with any differences in the show from night to night (dropped line, missed coda, etc.) Up until about two years ago, I had regularly performed in a pit orchestra for about 15 years, and it *does* make a difference. It's even more of a difference for something like "Les Mis", where the music is such an integral part of the show.
Knowing that a show was sequenced/synthesized would definitely temper my enthusiasm at seeing it.
That's rather interesting, considering the recent news about Disney and Microsoft teaming up to foist DRM on an unsuspecting world. Yeah, I know that's not what was really announced re: DIS and MSFT, but you know it's coming.
Let's not forget Apple's contribution as well - Applesoft BASIC was shipped with an awful lot of Apple IIs. Plus Microsoft was shipping BASIC interpreters for just about every machine under the sun in the 70's.
By the time PC-DOS was commissioned, MS had already been doing pretty well.
The danger of miscarriage of justice is great enough to cast doubt on a penalty whose wrongful infliction is by definition impossible to compensate
As a practical matter, victims of wrongful imprisonment are never compensated anyway. It's almost always the case where a man that has been in jail for something he didn't do is released without even so much as an apology, and no means to make up for the loss of his livelihood and reputation.
What's best, and what usually happens, is for the 2,000 people laid off to find other jobs.
In the case of the IT situation, that's not what's been happening. People are finding other jobs, but they're generally a lot lower-paying, and thus those people are now contributing a lot less to the economy. In addition, I think we're going to start seeing the U.S. suffer technologically as a nation when fewer college students risk pursuing courses of study that might end up being outsourced en masse. I find it hypocritical of American business to complain that U.S. colleges are not producing enough IT workers to meet demand, then proceed to ship those jobs overseas without even a pretense of trying to hire locally.
It just seems to me that, aside from outsourcing in particular, a lot of companies lately are concerning themselves with nothing beyond their stock price and the next two quarters with no thought to the long-term effects of their actions.
That's kind of counter-productive then - if you're filling a $60K position with an H-1B that will work for $35K you've still got one job that's been displaced, and because it's under the $73K cap the company avoids any punitive fees on top of saving $25K in direct labor costs, plus the tax/Social Security costs saved. Practically speaking, there aren't that many IT jobs that pay more than $73K, so I don't see what's really been gained here - there's still no real incentive for Ohio companies not to bring in H-1Bs.
Quite possibly. If it reduces the company's expenses, it lets them lower their prices and/or increase returns to their shareholders
It's rather uncommon to see prices fall as a result of outsourcing - most companies prefer to apply the savings directly to the bottom line.
The original comment was regarding public interest, not shareholder interest. Which is better for the public in general, to lay off 2,000 people and have the shareholders of Company X gain an extra 50 cents in dividends per share (if the company even declares a dividend), or to *not* lay them off and save the public the necessity of supporting 2,000 people on unemployment and the loss of their taxes?
Importing workers gives the US workers a chance to compete
Not where I work. Almost our entire software department is made up of Sri Lankans on H-1Bs (I'm sure the fact that our CEO is Sri Lankan and has a really good friend that owns an employment agency has NOTHING to do with that), and our entire electrical engineering department is Russian, again on H-1Bs. I personally interviewed many of the candidates for some of the openings that were filled with Sri Lankans, and frankly, there were Americans applying for the jobs that were more qualified. The Russians? Well, this past week I had to physically prevent our new EE manager (who has a Ph.D., no less) from burning up an oscilloscope by plugging the output of a laser RF driver directly into the scope input. Common sense should tell you that a 70 watt RF output isn't going to make the scope happy.
Not all companies are like that, but for many, the H-1B is a means of getting dirt cheap labor on-site. I've yet to hear of the government smacking anyone for the misuse of the program in this manner.
Note: Comcast reserves the right to immediately terminate the Service and the Subscriber Agreement if you engage in any of the prohibited activities listed in this AUP or if you use the Comcast Equipment or Service in a way which is contrary to any Comcast policies or any of Comcast's suppliers' policies.
Uh-huh. Good luck trying to get an enumeration of Comcast's policies, much less their suppliers', which makes it rather difficult for a customer to make an informed choice before entering into the agreement. "Our policy is that you can't violate any of our policies, whatever we decide they might be but won't tell you until you've broken one".
The remainder of the quoted AUP still doesn't change the fact that by advertising "unlimited service" Comcast is effectively pulling a bait and switch, owing to the fact that the vast majority of potential customers are going to accept the common definition of "unlimited" when making their initial decision to contact Comcast, and Comcast is using very nebulous language to hide the fact that there ARE caps, and that the service is not in fact unlimited. At no time are those limits disclosed to their customers, and from the language in the AUP, I'd guess most novice customers are not going to know to read between the lines to understand that they've effectively been lied to in the advertising and will not receive the product they're expecting. Comcast could make the terms of the offer crystal clear, but chooses not to because they know they'd get fewer subscribers.
Aside from this silliness, I'm not in a real good mood with Comcast right now since they can't seem to do rudimentary egress filtering on their residential accounts, resulting in a fair bit of spam for me from hijacked machines in their space. Unfortunately, I can't just filter their netblocks since I do receive legitimate mail from some of their customers.
PotC and FF were both reasonably good, as have been most of the Feature Animation-produced films, but the offshore-produced direct-to-video stuff is just crap, and within the company they have finally started to understand that they're diluting the Disney name with it.
Don't think it's going to make a lot of difference though, because no one in upper management understands what made the Disney name special - they operate on the belief that "more is better", and honestly can't see a difference in quality between "Cinderella 2" and "Lilo & Stitch" - all they know is that "L&S" cost them $80M to make, where "C2" only cost them $5M.
The parks aren't anywhere near tanking and actually have done quite well this past year, but they are suffering from the fact that a lot of money that would otherwise be going to maintain them is going to provide life support for divisions that are hemorrhaging money like ABC.
Feature Animation - Burbank has been suffering lately, but a lot of that can be attributed to the fact that Eisner and his minions are practically on-site and micro-manage the hell out of everything. I believe part of the reason FA - Florida has been able to turn out uniformly good work has been because they're 3000 miles away from that environment, and were freer to make their own decisions. So, management made the natural decision, and shut down the division that was 3 for 3. Idiots.
I believe Pixar is more about John Lasseter than Steve Jobs. Having said that, Roy Disney and Steve Jobs are rather good friends, and it's no secret that Eisner and Jobs don't get along very well. I would not be surprised if it comes out that Roy had a hand in the Pixar situation in his bid to unseat Eisner. From what I've heard, the Pixar deal was looking good until late last year when things started falling apart. Coincidence?
I appreciate the link, but I think I might have not been clear enough on my point - I'm not spending any more money on the machine, in either hardware or games. I'm not going to shell out $100 for a modified Samsung drive or spend $50 and two hours of my time modding a standard drive to fix the damn thing just so that I can play the one game my system refuses to read. I'd rather just sell the copy of Crimson Skies, be happy with the games I've got, and be content that MS isn't getting any more money from me.
I also like how Microsoft will not let you cancel the automatic renewal on pre-paid Xbox Live subscriptions without either jumping through some hoops near the renewal date, or forfeiting the balance of your current subscription. I chose the latter because I just didn't want to mess with them any further.
After the board raised it with the probable intent of getting Roy out of there. Eisner was getting a little tired of Roy's (perfectly valid, IMHO) criticism.
As a part-time employee of a certain large mouse-oriented theme park in Central Florida, let me say that Eisner is looked upon as the Antichrist by the majority of employees of said theme park, and Roy has almost total support. They're also pissed as hell at the way Feature Animation FL was treated, especially given that they created three solid movies in a row, something Burbank has not been able to do because they're under Eisner's thumb.
Slashdot Mirror
11 musicians is more than half the orchestra - they're not just replacing filler.
As I remember, the score for "Les Mis" calls for a couple of DX7s, but that's it. The remainder is traditional instrumentation.
Unless someone's done something interesting with arrangements, the musicians playing the score for Les Mis have very little to no creative input in the music they're producing. They play what's on the score, and there's very little interaction between the cast and orchestra in a typical concert hall.
How is this different from a symphony concert? Everyone's playing what's on the stand in front of them, with little to no creative input.
The difference is in the performance itself - the performances are a little different from night to night, and a full orchestra that's paying attention to what's happening onstage will be able to compensate seamlessly with any differences in the show from night to night (dropped line, missed coda, etc.) Up until about two years ago, I had regularly performed in a pit orchestra for about 15 years, and it *does* make a difference. It's even more of a difference for something like "Les Mis", where the music is such an integral part of the show.
Knowing that a show was sequenced/synthesized would definitely temper my enthusiasm at seeing it.
The travel industry sucks right now, so all of disney's resorts should be discounted.
And I'm assuming you have Disney's resort occupancy numbers to back this up?
That's rather interesting, considering the recent news about Disney and Microsoft teaming up to foist DRM on an unsuspecting world. Yeah, I know that's not what was really announced re: DIS and MSFT, but you know it's coming.
I'd bet on the dog to turn the company around.
Worldcom did that, not MCI. MCI actually had real assets, a real business model, and real customers until Worldcom came onto the scene.
Verisign doesn't run .org, PIR does. This page details the registrars for the most common TLDs.
Exactly - the sound pressure levels around an active sonar dome are such that the water is instantaneously boiled to a distance of several inches.
Let's not forget Apple's contribution as well - Applesoft BASIC was shipped with an awful lot of Apple IIs. Plus Microsoft was shipping BASIC interpreters for just about every machine under the sun in the 70's. By the time PC-DOS was commissioned, MS had already been doing pretty well.
The danger of miscarriage of justice is great enough to cast doubt on a penalty whose wrongful infliction is by definition impossible to compensate
As a practical matter, victims of wrongful imprisonment are never compensated anyway. It's almost always the case where a man that has been in jail for something he didn't do is released without even so much as an apology, and no means to make up for the loss of his livelihood and reputation.
Sarcasm, it's what's for dinner. Guess you missed the dinner bell.
What's best, and what usually happens, is for the 2,000 people laid off to find other jobs.
In the case of the IT situation, that's not what's been happening. People are finding other jobs, but they're generally a lot lower-paying, and thus those people are now contributing a lot less to the economy. In addition, I think we're going to start seeing the U.S. suffer technologically as a nation when fewer college students risk pursuing courses of study that might end up being outsourced en masse. I find it hypocritical of American business to complain that U.S. colleges are not producing enough IT workers to meet demand, then proceed to ship those jobs overseas without even a pretense of trying to hire locally.
It just seems to me that, aside from outsourcing in particular, a lot of companies lately are concerning themselves with nothing beyond their stock price and the next two quarters with no thought to the long-term effects of their actions.
That's kind of counter-productive then - if you're filling a $60K position with an H-1B that will work for $35K you've still got one job that's been displaced, and because it's under the $73K cap the company avoids any punitive fees on top of saving $25K in direct labor costs, plus the tax/Social Security costs saved. Practically speaking, there aren't that many IT jobs that pay more than $73K, so I don't see what's really been gained here - there's still no real incentive for Ohio companies not to bring in H-1Bs.
Quite possibly. If it reduces the company's expenses, it lets them lower their prices and/or increase returns to their shareholders
It's rather uncommon to see prices fall as a result of outsourcing - most companies prefer to apply the savings directly to the bottom line.
The original comment was regarding public interest, not shareholder interest. Which is better for the public in general, to lay off 2,000 people and have the shareholders of Company X gain an extra 50 cents in dividends per share (if the company even declares a dividend), or to *not* lay them off and save the public the necessity of supporting 2,000 people on unemployment and the loss of their taxes?
Importing workers gives the US workers a chance to compete
Not where I work. Almost our entire software department is made up of Sri Lankans on H-1Bs (I'm sure the fact that our CEO is Sri Lankan and has a really good friend that owns an employment agency has NOTHING to do with that), and our entire electrical engineering department is Russian, again on H-1Bs. I personally interviewed many of the candidates for some of the openings that were filled with Sri Lankans, and frankly, there were Americans applying for the jobs that were more qualified. The Russians? Well, this past week I had to physically prevent our new EE manager (who has a Ph.D., no less) from burning up an oscilloscope by plugging the output of a laser RF driver directly into the scope input. Common sense should tell you that a 70 watt RF output isn't going to make the scope happy.
Not all companies are like that, but for many, the H-1B is a means of getting dirt cheap labor on-site. I've yet to hear of the government smacking anyone for the misuse of the program in this manner.
Where are those new binaries going to live with no hard disk? Are we supposed to download a gigabyte of data every time we want to play an old game?
Yeah, that Internet Explorer is a real quality product...
Note: Comcast reserves the right to immediately terminate the Service and the Subscriber Agreement if you engage in any of the prohibited activities listed in this AUP or if you use the Comcast Equipment or Service in a way which is contrary to any Comcast policies or any of Comcast's suppliers' policies.
Uh-huh. Good luck trying to get an enumeration of Comcast's policies, much less their suppliers', which makes it rather difficult for a customer to make an informed choice before entering into the agreement. "Our policy is that you can't violate any of our policies, whatever we decide they might be but won't tell you until you've broken one". The remainder of the quoted AUP still doesn't change the fact that by advertising "unlimited service" Comcast is effectively pulling a bait and switch, owing to the fact that the vast majority of potential customers are going to accept the common definition of "unlimited" when making their initial decision to contact Comcast, and Comcast is using very nebulous language to hide the fact that there ARE caps, and that the service is not in fact unlimited. At no time are those limits disclosed to their customers, and from the language in the AUP, I'd guess most novice customers are not going to know to read between the lines to understand that they've effectively been lied to in the advertising and will not receive the product they're expecting. Comcast could make the terms of the offer crystal clear, but chooses not to because they know they'd get fewer subscribers.
Aside from this silliness, I'm not in a real good mood with Comcast right now since they can't seem to do rudimentary egress filtering on their residential accounts, resulting in a fair bit of spam for me from hijacked machines in their space. Unfortunately, I can't just filter their netblocks since I do receive legitimate mail from some of their customers.
PotC and FF were both reasonably good, as have been most of the Feature Animation-produced films, but the offshore-produced direct-to-video stuff is just crap, and within the company they have finally started to understand that they're diluting the Disney name with it.
Don't think it's going to make a lot of difference though, because no one in upper management understands what made the Disney name special - they operate on the belief that "more is better", and honestly can't see a difference in quality between "Cinderella 2" and "Lilo & Stitch" - all they know is that "L&S" cost them $80M to make, where "C2" only cost them $5M.
The parks aren't anywhere near tanking and actually have done quite well this past year, but they are suffering from the fact that a lot of money that would otherwise be going to maintain them is going to provide life support for divisions that are hemorrhaging money like ABC.
Feature Animation - Burbank has been suffering lately, but a lot of that can be attributed to the fact that Eisner and his minions are practically on-site and micro-manage the hell out of everything. I believe part of the reason FA - Florida has been able to turn out uniformly good work has been because they're 3000 miles away from that environment, and were freer to make their own decisions. So, management made the natural decision, and shut down the division that was 3 for 3. Idiots.
And don't forget that Roy Disney and Steve Jobs are friendly with one another, while Jobs and Eisner aren't. Not good for the Mikester.
I believe Pixar is more about John Lasseter than Steve Jobs. Having said that, Roy Disney and Steve Jobs are rather good friends, and it's no secret that Eisner and Jobs don't get along very well. I would not be surprised if it comes out that Roy had a hand in the Pixar situation in his bid to unseat Eisner. From what I've heard, the Pixar deal was looking good until late last year when things started falling apart. Coincidence?
I appreciate the link, but I think I might have not been clear enough on my point - I'm not spending any more money on the machine, in either hardware or games. I'm not going to shell out $100 for a modified Samsung drive or spend $50 and two hours of my time modding a standard drive to fix the damn thing just so that I can play the one game my system refuses to read. I'd rather just sell the copy of Crimson Skies, be happy with the games I've got, and be content that MS isn't getting any more money from me.
I also like how Microsoft will not let you cancel the automatic renewal on pre-paid Xbox Live subscriptions without either jumping through some hoops near the renewal date, or forfeiting the balance of your current subscription. I chose the latter because I just didn't want to mess with them any further.
After the board raised it with the probable intent of getting Roy out of there. Eisner was getting a little tired of Roy's (perfectly valid, IMHO) criticism.
As a part-time employee of a certain large mouse-oriented theme park in Central Florida, let me say that Eisner is looked upon as the Antichrist by the majority of employees of said theme park, and Roy has almost total support. They're also pissed as hell at the way Feature Animation FL was treated, especially given that they created three solid movies in a row, something Burbank has not been able to do because they're under Eisner's thumb.