I hate to tell you this, but he's right. There is no truly "fiscally liberal" party.
To be fiscally liberal, they would have to be firmly in favor (not just in favor because it's the "in" thing) of practices that many Americans openly call communist â" things like subsidies for low-income workers without any other means to support themselves, tax breaks for the poor, and other things that attempt to spread wealth around instead of concentrating it in the hands of a few exclusive groups. That's what being "fiscally liberal" is.
The description that both political camps are fiscally conservative is apt; Republicans want to concentrate money in the hands of corporate executives, the military, and law enforcement (with some also trying to funnel money to religious causes), while Democrats want to concentrate money in the hands of different corporate executives and the government as a whole instead of a few specific branches of it.
To quote the Bard, "A pox on both your Houses" â" because neither camp cares about anything outside of their narrow band of interest.
What is the issue here?
We automate lots of other work, why not this?
You are missing the point. Music is not the kind of work that can be duplicated like a car and still provide the same effect. Music has no identically interchangeable parts. If I swap out the principal trumpet in my orchestra for another equally-qualified trumpet player, I'll get the same basic level of performance, but the subtleties of that performance will change. The way in which that player interprets their part will change. It may be something so simple as playing a particular passage a little louder or a little softer, or with a change in crescendo during a particular peak moment, but those individual subtleties change the qualities of the music, and thus, the emotional response that the music evokes in the listener. Music is not an objective art. It cannot be distilled down into a bunch of ones and zeroes and still retain all of the qualities that make it special. Even if you don't notice those things, there are people who do and those people look for those kinds of subtle qualities when they listen to a performance. It makes the experience more real for them.
(edited for trolling)
Why where they not already using recordings was my first question when I saw this article.
The reality is that a recording is fixed and the performers on stage are not. The performers may (rightly-so) feel unnecessarily hamstrung if they have to try to fit their performances to a recorded track. Many very small production companies and some schools do it this way already (either out of lack of experience or out of financial need) but professional theatre groups have no business resorting to this tactic. It cheapens the experience and makes that $100 ticket you paid for worth that much less.
But what about pop music? Pop stars already use recordings, largely because there's so much movement on stage and parading around that your vocal ability is going to go into the toilet from all the movement - so lipsyncing to the recording is the only way it's going to sound even remotely passable. Choreographed performances in musicals are done differently - most songs are sung with a minimum of strenuous movement so that the vocals remain unaffected, and the more complex dance breaks are all instrumental - or if there IS a vocal part, it's either shouts or spoken words. So while I don't exactly condone it in pop music, with the attention on sex appeal, costuming, lighting, and special effects in a pop concert (rather than the music), recordings are necessary to retain what integrity is left of the musical performance.
Put simply, recordings have no place in live music or live theatre. Using a recording defeats the purpose of it being considered "live". I know I'd feel cheated if I paid for tickets to a musical and found that the musicians, singers, and actors on stage were all pre-recorded and that the people on stage just moved around without really doing anything.
The union may strike, which will only make things tougher on the musicians themselves in the end. What the union SHOULD do rather than just blindly strike (and I'm a card-carrying AFM member) is attempt to use their muscle to get licensing houses to enforce rules on "sticking to the score". It's already done heavily in terms of the text, why not the musicians? You can make cuts and edits for time or to adapt to the capability of the group, but if you're doing a full-on Broadway-level production with the appropriate talent, you shouldn't need to make cuts or edits.
A development like this is good for very small groups who have severely limited resources to hire musicians, and amateur-level productions should be allowed to do this. But at the level these people are performing at, coming by great musicians isn't hard, and the only reason the producers are doing it is pure greed. The production contracts should be what prohibits this kind of nonsense, because the audience CAN tell the difference between a live human and a synth, even if they are the most state-of-the-art. Even if you personally can't, I can, and I know lots of other non-musicians out there who can very clearly tell the difference between a synthesized performance and a live one.
The core argument here is not about money, although that's the facade it hides behind. While money is a component of the argument, the major sticking point is that this is handing off to computers a job that computers have no business doing. Computers have no means of expression, no emotion, and no understanding of the nuances of music to take black notes on a page and turn them into something greater than the sum of its parts. Sure, you can program algorithms and subroutines to take advantage of quantifiable, objective moments in music, but those occurrences in music are the exception, not the norm, and when things like this happen, the art is poorer for the experience.
Computers are excellent at jobs where the limits are finite, the ranges are quantifiable, and the duties are clear-cut. Music is none of those things. Humans, on the other hand, are excellent at those things. Leave to humans the jobs that humans can do. When computers fully develop sentience, critical thinking, decision-making ability, a sense of aesthetics, and a sense of right, wrong, and morality, THEN we'll talk about letting your PC sit in the principal violinist's chair.
Pretty simple. The AFM represents the same tired, defunct business model they always have (at least, when you look at the recording industry-related elements).
I'm an AFM member, and pretty strongly disagree with the "party line" that they sometimes tow, and have pretty loudly spoken out sometimes against the mindless following that sometimes happens in our local when it comes to that.
The real problem is that far too many working musicians can be bothered with things like, oh, actually bothering to read the details of what they're "supporting" because they're too busy trying to earn enough money to pay the rent. If you were to ask a lot of them individually, yeah, they'd certainly support a more freely-structured copyright system. AFM "calls to action" are worded so strongly that you'd be a fool -not- to want to go along with it. Trouble is that with the real legislation, nobody in their right mind (at least, who doesn't get a cut of the take) would support it if people actually bothered to read it.
Don't get me wrong, the AFM does really good things in some ways - in my local's case, a central place to look for students to teach, easy job disbursement and a smartly-managed local in terms of personnel. In the national's case, making sure musicians get paid for the work they do, offering legal representation in the case of shoddy bookkeepers and crooked talent managers, and other bad people in the music business.
The downside is that the national spams me every now and then with a "call to action" which usually isn't helpful. And their national agenda is just as crooked as the people they defend the musicians themselves against.
IANAL, but being ordered to do something illegal under threat of duress would not generally be considered a "willful" action.
However:
The OP has a responsibility to report their employer for such things; and if the employer is corrupt enough to threaten his job, he needs to leave. And -then- report the employer, when they are in less of a position to affect him.
Although, there's certainly a strong case for just leaving, because many companies are notorious for not looking too fondly on hiring a known whistleblower.
Hate to burst your bubble, but there's a lot more struggling musicians out there than there are affluent ones. Yes, there's a chunk of them that are independently wealthy and are able to sit on their asses. However, the real schlubs go out and work a 40-hr/wk job just to put food on the table and then go play at some dingy club that's full of smoke and half-drunk people just to barely make enough in gas money to get home.
More still join bands that make no money.
Why? Because they love their art, and making money is a secondary thing. Popularized musicians are RARELY about the art of making music and more about making money from it, and hence, this is the real problem.
Making blanket statements like that is one of the main reasons that our society is so unbelievably ill-informed - when the only thing you know is an image perpetuated by the top 1% of a segment of society, things get rather skewed out of balance. This is made far worse when those same people refuse to do the legwork necessary to inform themselves of what it's like for the other 99%.
In reality, making the kind of money those "musicians" make is nigh-impossible. More often than not, most musicians have enough trouble breaking even doing what they love because our society places so little actual value on music and art.
As an example:
I, as a trumpet player, charge $200 for a wedding service. That's me coming in and playing at your church service at your blessed event. Now, the typical wedding lasts about 2 hours. This turns out to be about $100/hr. Great pay scale, right? Well, not so much. If you only do one or two weddings a month, that's maybe $400/mo you can add to your paycheck. Which doesn't really get you all that far in the grand scheme of things. And this kind of money doesn't happen unless you've managed to really establish yourself nicely. It's rare to find an instrumentalist who can truly support himself with gigs.
Now, add this to the fact that MOST people will grouse and bitch at you when you tell them your fee. Yet, they don't realize that your fee is what it is because the gigs come so infrequently. And more frequently, they don't care about this simple fact, they simply want you to play for pennies because it would be "a nice touch." They frequently forget that you have to eat too.
Many, MANY couples will balk at the idea of paying $200 for a musician. Far more frequently, they'll offer one of three things: A) No money, B) Free dinner at the reception, or C) $25-50. And they'll use the same argument as I explained above: "$25 an hour is a great payscale! What's your problem?" They fail to realize that there is no earthly way I can work a 40-hour week like that. Nobody can. Even some of the most famous players in the world have trouble commanding the rates they are truly due. These are guys struggling to make ends meet playing their instruments.
Note that these are -NOT- people who are over-hyped, over-makeupped, and over-plastic-surgeried into false images of extreme hotness like some pop stars, nor are they the gurus of rock 'n roll that we all recognize. They are average people, who work desk jobs to earn a "real" paycheck, like you and I. They just happen to play an instrument as their real passion and love, and work their desk job to make sure they don't go hungry.
So, before you go generalizing all musicians as people who don't have to work for a living, why don't you try finding out what real musicians actually do "for a living?" Because I'll guarantee that the large volume of musicians hold down "real jobs" of one flavor or another.
THAT SAID: Tougher copyright laws are not the answer. Curtailing corporate greed -IS.- Making it harder for the record labels to squeeze every last penny out of their contracts -is.- Forcing the record (and movie) industry to abandon old, consumer-punishing business models -is.- Knocking the astronomical fees of pop-stars, actors, and actresses down a few pegs to show them that they're not above the rest of society -is.- Shifting
This means that we'll just have to breed a better guitarist (maybe breed humans with 12 fingers instead of 10, like in the movie Contact -- the 12-fingered pianist) or breed a guitarist with four hands and four arms so that he can play two guitars at once.
And I'm sure that what the world needs right now is more mechanical guitar playing. Because that sounds SO good.
I think he (the article) gets away from the real point of good UI and feature design -- keep it simple and straightforward. Your new whizbang app could have 32,000 features, but if the UI is designed properly and made so that it is easy to understand and is adaptable depending on the user (redefinable toolbars, for example) you can make a program that is powerful and presents itself to most users at a level they can comprehend. The idea that a user shouldn't have to "jump through hoops" to do the most basic of tasks is a good one, and something that designers should adhere to.
Of course, I'm preaching to the choir here.
I do agree with his sentiment about bogging programs down with useless things, though. His example using the encyclopedia is something I would find particularly annoying, although I can see how small children might be amused by such nonsense (especially if that's who the product was designed for). People who design the UIs for these programs should be thinking of usability, not frills. If you want frills, fine, but at least allow us to turn them off.
and I wonder how many people who put in the time and effort needed to perform Concierto de Aranjuez realize it wasn't written by a musician?
Milton Babbitt was a mathematician who was on staff at Princeton near the end of the second World War. He managed to make several electronic works that were basically mathematical algorithms run through a processor and "approximated" with conventional notation. His work for solo soprano and tape entitled Philomel is just such a work. If you're behind a university connection, you can probably check out the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and look him up in their online database. Most uni's are part of their subscription service.
Aleatoric music, chance music, etc. The eclectic stuff. Go to your local uni's music library and look up composers like John Cage, George Crumb, Donald Erb, Joseph Schwantner, et al. That's what he meant by funky. The scores are frequently beautiful to look at but are a pain in the ass to read because they DON'T conform to the norm.
Based on what I see from Lilypond's introduction, it isn't capable of producing print music that doesn't conform to that definition of "music" we're so used to. For example, music without a key or time signature, nonstandard key signatures, cutout scores, feathered beaming, ossia measures, etc.
Also, as someone who has done work in engraving and copying print music, Lilypond would need to have a nicer MIDI-compatible interface thrown on top of it to compete. As a file format I think it will work, but as a complete solution it is not viable as it is. No copyist I know would sit down with a text editor and try to copy over scores or parts. It's too cumbersome -- I tried to do it. I had a copy job that I originally tried to do in Lilypond via the text interface and copying one part from the score took almot nine hours of typing, rendering it, fixing it, and re-rendering it to ensure that it came out right. Meanwhile, if I sit down with Finale, I can have it done in an hour.
It's come a long way, but there's a lot of work left to do before it's ready to hit the big time.
Regardless -- feel free to prove me wrong by posting a link to a rendered example of such music. I'd love to be proven wrong in this department.
Would that mean that they'll call the next hardware revision the "Opus?"
Re:Very Old but Powerful for its time.. & stil
on
Implementing VisiCalc
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· Score: 1
You're right - the MECC Curriculum was one of the greatest educational program series ever created. Problem is, all those programs were stored on 5.25" floppies, and we know how careful 2nd graders are with things like that. Worse yet, you can't find the programs available for sale anymore except in second hand shops (or eBay), and I seriously doubt any school district would want to get itself involved in emulation, due to some people seeing it as legally dubious.
School district administrators are very leery of doing business with second-hand places or eBay - to the point that it will probably only happen in a select few places, if at all. The only thing to do is to use 'em if ya got 'em - they are INCREDIBLE educational tools, but their availability is limited, at best.
The other issue is that "eye candy" has become part & parcel in the game world, so kids now expect it. If it's not there, they go "this sucks" and leave it behind. I recently went on a trip with the high school band I student teach to Chicago - I took my iBook, a copy of RockNES, and a few games from my childhood, and I had kids wondering what I was playing, but saying things like "boy, the graphics sure suck - how can you enjoy something like that?"
Gone are the days when, because you could only do so much with graphics, you had to put engaging content in its place. Oregon Trail was an incredible game not for its graphics but for its content. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? was one of the unusual entries that DID have great graphics (for an Apple II) AND had great content. Number Munchers was probably my favorite game, and it wasn't the greatest graphically. Anyway, your idea is great in theory, but from the way I've seen things work at my school, administrators would reject it in a heartbeat.:(
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic. --- Roy Blount, Jr.
If you read the letter they sent Martijn, they mention the following games:
007
Barbarian
Donkey Kong
Frogger
Mario
Pac Man
Soldier of Fortune
There are some fundamental flaws with several of the titles they mention.
First, 007. This could be one of two things: One, the moron who wrote the letter confused the titles available off the page with the Sega arcade title 005, or two, 007 is a blanket statement for all the games with 007 in the title, of which there are several, are all registered to a Domark Ltd., which is actually a subsidiary of Eidos, which is a member of the IDSA. There ordinarily wouldn't be a problem with this except:C&D letters like this are supposed to explicitly mention the software title being infringed, aren't they? (IANAL!!)
Next, Barbarian. Created by Icon Design, a little tiny software manufacturer that only produced Spectrum titles during the last few years of the system's life. First off, Icon Design doesn't appear to have been bought by anyone, although Namco is a likely candidate considering that the software house produced a version of Rastan for the Spectrum. However, presuming that the software manufacturer was allowed to die on its own and wasn't bought up, the IDSA doesn't have a leg to stand on with this one.
Donkey Kong and Frogger were both licensed. Nintendo and Sega both have no control over the licensed copies. That belongs to the original producers (again, IANAL), and the IDSA has no control again.
Pac-Man, again, was licensed. Namco has no hold on this copy.
Soldier of Fortune is not the version we all know now, but a little known title produced by Firebird Software, which was later folded into British Telecom. Since British Telecom isn't a member of the IDSA, I hardly believe they have control over this title either.
Add to all this the fact that this guy's collected permission letters from individual authors all over the place, I think the IDSA is literally grasping at straws. Makes me wonder if they're really acting on behalf of Nintendo/Sega/Namco/etc., or they're just looking for work.
It's very simple - IR keyboards had transmission problems, and they can royally screw up most televisions and VCRs because the codes used to transmit characters/commands from the keyboard to the receiver may be similar to the TV/VCR's code. I recall a friend of mine had an IR keyboard that would mess up the television (selecting random channels, disabling the remote, other nonsense) every time he used it in the vicinity of the TV.
Another problem is that the battery life issue on IR keyboards is much more problematic. IR keyboards last about 1/3 the length of most digital radio keyboards, and frequently take more batteries to operate (the keyboard in the example mentioned earlier took 4 AAs).
Still another problem is the flakiness they get in terms of reception. The keyboard would frequently need to be aimed just right to work properly, and often wouldn't work at distances greater than a couple of feet, which practically defeats the purpose of even having a wireless keyboard. IR keyboards frequently drop characters even at close ranges or input incorrect characters if the receiver misses part of the transmission.
You are right, there is a MIDI control panel - off the Applications/Utilities folder. It's called "Audio MIDI Setup" and, depending on your hardware setup, will autodetect most MIDI devices. USB devices work best, obviously. Additionally, this little gem of an app includes a complete set of controls for recording/playback devices - it even has a mini software mixer in it. I have some MIDI devices at home which I have not had the chance to test yet, but I can certainly go home and try it out and see what the MIDI devices tab says about the setup. I would guess that you'd probably have to have drivers that support OS 10.2 for everything to work correctly. My Roland SoundCanvas doesn't yet have non-beta drivers for it because they don't really have any OS X native MIDI apps to test it with yet:) (they have beta drivers for 10.1.2 & later but that's about it)
Give most of the major manufacturers about 1 month and there'll probably be some things ready.
...if 20th Century Fox actually talked to the estate managers of Gustav Holst for their use of sections of his Planets Suite or if they figured that they could get away with it by using only about 30 seconds (cut into pieces, no less) of it to get their soundtrack for that X-Men 2 trailer...
Against it. What he is saying is that television has become such a widely successful marketing tool that companies will pour millions into a tiny 30-second time slot, all to get you to buy their product. Commercials are designed to make you feel as though you are somehow less of a person, less intelligent, or inferior to everyone else unless you buy their products or use their services.
The beer commercial is the classic example of a product that is so constantly associated with a vision that is not even remotely associated with reality. Since when does drinking a beer magically turn you into a stud whom the girls can't resist? As I see it, beer has a nasty tendency to make you slow, stupid, potentially dangerous, and generally repulsive if you aren't careful.
The images that fermion mentions are equally as ludicrous. That's why they're great examples. Taking your kids to McDonalds does not and never will equate to properly loving and caring for your children. Coca-Cola is not synonymous with the American dream. Anyone who believes that drinking Coke will automatically make you successful deserves whatever fate is handed to them.
This is why a recent Ask Slashdot ran chills up my spine. The De Beers diamond cartel designed a series of commercials (none of which are running anymore, thankfully) that actually had the gall to tout the sales pitch "how else can two months salary last a lifetime" when everyone knows that a diamond is not going to keep your marriage intact. Your wife may love it, but if YOU aren't a good husband then no amount of jewels will help.
But then again, we know this. It's the masses who don't.
That's why I have my student website listed - there's not really a bandwidth penalty. Sure, the IT guys might come knocking and asking what I have stored on my web account, but it's laid right in front of them, and what's a cookbook going to do? Eat them??
I'm not familiar with TeX at all. I am more than willing to post a TeX version, perhaps someone could point me to a good reference, OR be willing to convert it to TeX for me?
So far I have been quite selective in what I've taken -- I've passed over quite a lot of recipes in the comments here. The stuff that's been emailed to me however, looks quite good - I've only sifted through about 25% of it, but nearly everything I got went in. I do plan to test what I can, but my home is a far cry from the Betty Crocker Kitchens, so the ever-present disclaimer of YMMV will be present:) Anyway, I hope to have a preliminary version up this weekend to give everyone an idea of what the book will look like along with some of the recipes that have already been collected.
That's great, but I'm no coder, hence I am at a loss in terms of creating a web database. The only "closed" version will end up being the PDF version, because you can't really "add" to PDFs, even with Acrobat. (if there's some other way, I'd love to know) I'm putting out PDFs because they preserve the formatting and the font-embed routines actually work. The TXT and word document formats are about as open as can be. Of course, the PDF would get updated as I received submissions. I also plan to try to put the project up on freshmeat.net as was suggested to me in an email sent my way.
The whole first few sections of the cookbook is dedicated to basic instructions and what they mean. For the obvious ones, I don't go into detail (like bake) but for the more esoteric ones (like deglazing) I do explain what gets done. Also, at the end there'll be a spice catalog with some information about some major spices that I know of.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to tell you this, but he's right. There is no truly "fiscally liberal" party. To be fiscally liberal, they would have to be firmly in favor (not just in favor because it's the "in" thing) of practices that many Americans openly call communist â" things like subsidies for low-income workers without any other means to support themselves, tax breaks for the poor, and other things that attempt to spread wealth around instead of concentrating it in the hands of a few exclusive groups. That's what being "fiscally liberal" is. The description that both political camps are fiscally conservative is apt; Republicans want to concentrate money in the hands of corporate executives, the military, and law enforcement (with some also trying to funnel money to religious causes), while Democrats want to concentrate money in the hands of different corporate executives and the government as a whole instead of a few specific branches of it. To quote the Bard, "A pox on both your Houses" â" because neither camp cares about anything outside of their narrow band of interest.
What is the issue here?
We automate lots of other work, why not this?
You are missing the point. Music is not the kind of work that can be duplicated like a car and still provide the same effect. Music has no identically interchangeable parts. If I swap out the principal trumpet in my orchestra for another equally-qualified trumpet player, I'll get the same basic level of performance, but the subtleties of that performance will change. The way in which that player interprets their part will change. It may be something so simple as playing a particular passage a little louder or a little softer, or with a change in crescendo during a particular peak moment, but those individual subtleties change the qualities of the music, and thus, the emotional response that the music evokes in the listener. Music is not an objective art. It cannot be distilled down into a bunch of ones and zeroes and still retain all of the qualities that make it special. Even if you don't notice those things, there are people who do and those people look for those kinds of subtle qualities when they listen to a performance. It makes the experience more real for them.
(edited for trolling)
Why where they not already using recordings was my first question when I saw this article.
The reality is that a recording is fixed and the performers on stage are not. The performers may (rightly-so) feel unnecessarily hamstrung if they have to try to fit their performances to a recorded track. Many very small production companies and some schools do it this way already (either out of lack of experience or out of financial need) but professional theatre groups have no business resorting to this tactic. It cheapens the experience and makes that $100 ticket you paid for worth that much less.
But what about pop music? Pop stars already use recordings, largely because there's so much movement on stage and parading around that your vocal ability is going to go into the toilet from all the movement - so lipsyncing to the recording is the only way it's going to sound even remotely passable. Choreographed performances in musicals are done differently - most songs are sung with a minimum of strenuous movement so that the vocals remain unaffected, and the more complex dance breaks are all instrumental - or if there IS a vocal part, it's either shouts or spoken words. So while I don't exactly condone it in pop music, with the attention on sex appeal, costuming, lighting, and special effects in a pop concert (rather than the music), recordings are necessary to retain what integrity is left of the musical performance.
Put simply, recordings have no place in live music or live theatre. Using a recording defeats the purpose of it being considered "live". I know I'd feel cheated if I paid for tickets to a musical and found that the musicians, singers, and actors on stage were all pre-recorded and that the people on stage just moved around without really doing anything.
The union may strike, which will only make things tougher on the musicians themselves in the end. What the union SHOULD do rather than just blindly strike (and I'm a card-carrying AFM member) is attempt to use their muscle to get licensing houses to enforce rules on "sticking to the score". It's already done heavily in terms of the text, why not the musicians? You can make cuts and edits for time or to adapt to the capability of the group, but if you're doing a full-on Broadway-level production with the appropriate talent, you shouldn't need to make cuts or edits.
A development like this is good for very small groups who have severely limited resources to hire musicians, and amateur-level productions should be allowed to do this. But at the level these people are performing at, coming by great musicians isn't hard, and the only reason the producers are doing it is pure greed. The production contracts should be what prohibits this kind of nonsense, because the audience CAN tell the difference between a live human and a synth, even if they are the most state-of-the-art. Even if you personally can't, I can, and I know lots of other non-musicians out there who can very clearly tell the difference between a synthesized performance and a live one.
The core argument here is not about money, although that's the facade it hides behind. While money is a component of the argument, the major sticking point is that this is handing off to computers a job that computers have no business doing. Computers have no means of expression, no emotion, and no understanding of the nuances of music to take black notes on a page and turn them into something greater than the sum of its parts. Sure, you can program algorithms and subroutines to take advantage of quantifiable, objective moments in music, but those occurrences in music are the exception, not the norm, and when things like this happen, the art is poorer for the experience.
Computers are excellent at jobs where the limits are finite, the ranges are quantifiable, and the duties are clear-cut. Music is none of those things. Humans, on the other hand, are excellent at those things. Leave to humans the jobs that humans can do. When computers fully develop sentience, critical thinking, decision-making ability, a sense of aesthetics, and a sense of right, wrong, and morality, THEN we'll talk about letting your PC sit in the principal violinist's chair.
Pretty simple. The AFM represents the same tired, defunct business model they always have (at least, when you look at the recording industry-related elements). I'm an AFM member, and pretty strongly disagree with the "party line" that they sometimes tow, and have pretty loudly spoken out sometimes against the mindless following that sometimes happens in our local when it comes to that. The real problem is that far too many working musicians can be bothered with things like, oh, actually bothering to read the details of what they're "supporting" because they're too busy trying to earn enough money to pay the rent. If you were to ask a lot of them individually, yeah, they'd certainly support a more freely-structured copyright system. AFM "calls to action" are worded so strongly that you'd be a fool -not- to want to go along with it. Trouble is that with the real legislation, nobody in their right mind (at least, who doesn't get a cut of the take) would support it if people actually bothered to read it. Don't get me wrong, the AFM does really good things in some ways - in my local's case, a central place to look for students to teach, easy job disbursement and a smartly-managed local in terms of personnel. In the national's case, making sure musicians get paid for the work they do, offering legal representation in the case of shoddy bookkeepers and crooked talent managers, and other bad people in the music business. The downside is that the national spams me every now and then with a "call to action" which usually isn't helpful. And their national agenda is just as crooked as the people they defend the musicians themselves against.
There's a key word up there that you are missing.
WILLFUL.
IANAL, but being ordered to do something illegal under threat of duress would not generally be considered a "willful" action.
However:
The OP has a responsibility to report their employer for such things; and if the employer is corrupt enough to threaten his job, he needs to leave. And -then- report the employer, when they are in less of a position to affect him.
Although, there's certainly a strong case for just leaving, because many companies are notorious for not looking too fondly on hiring a known whistleblower.
Hate to burst your bubble, but there's a lot more struggling musicians out there than there are affluent ones. Yes, there's a chunk of them that are independently wealthy and are able to sit on their asses. However, the real schlubs go out and work a 40-hr/wk job just to put food on the table and then go play at some dingy club that's full of smoke and half-drunk people just to barely make enough in gas money to get home.
More still join bands that make no money.
Why? Because they love their art, and making money is a secondary thing. Popularized musicians are RARELY about the art of making music and more about making money from it, and hence, this is the real problem.
Making blanket statements like that is one of the main reasons that our society is so unbelievably ill-informed - when the only thing you know is an image perpetuated by the top 1% of a segment of society, things get rather skewed out of balance. This is made far worse when those same people refuse to do the legwork necessary to inform themselves of what it's like for the other 99%.
In reality, making the kind of money those "musicians" make is nigh-impossible. More often than not, most musicians have enough trouble breaking even doing what they love because our society places so little actual value on music and art.
As an example:
I, as a trumpet player, charge $200 for a wedding service. That's me coming in and playing at your church service at your blessed event. Now, the typical wedding lasts about 2 hours. This turns out to be about $100/hr. Great pay scale, right? Well, not so much. If you only do one or two weddings a month, that's maybe $400/mo you can add to your paycheck. Which doesn't really get you all that far in the grand scheme of things. And this kind of money doesn't happen unless you've managed to really establish yourself nicely. It's rare to find an instrumentalist who can truly support himself with gigs.
Now, add this to the fact that MOST people will grouse and bitch at you when you tell them your fee. Yet, they don't realize that your fee is what it is because the gigs come so infrequently. And more frequently, they don't care about this simple fact, they simply want you to play for pennies because it would be "a nice touch." They frequently forget that you have to eat too.
Many, MANY couples will balk at the idea of paying $200 for a musician. Far more frequently, they'll offer one of three things: A) No money, B) Free dinner at the reception, or C) $25-50. And they'll use the same argument as I explained above: "$25 an hour is a great payscale! What's your problem?" They fail to realize that there is no earthly way I can work a 40-hour week like that. Nobody can. Even some of the most famous players in the world have trouble commanding the rates they are truly due. These are guys struggling to make ends meet playing their instruments.
Note that these are -NOT- people who are over-hyped, over-makeupped, and over-plastic-surgeried into false images of extreme hotness like some pop stars, nor are they the gurus of rock 'n roll that we all recognize. They are average people, who work desk jobs to earn a "real" paycheck, like you and I. They just happen to play an instrument as their real passion and love, and work their desk job to make sure they don't go hungry.
So, before you go generalizing all musicians as people who don't have to work for a living, why don't you try finding out what real musicians actually do "for a living?" Because I'll guarantee that the large volume of musicians hold down "real jobs" of one flavor or another.
THAT SAID: Tougher copyright laws are not the answer. Curtailing corporate greed -IS.- Making it harder for the record labels to squeeze every last penny out of their contracts -is.- Forcing the record (and movie) industry to abandon old, consumer-punishing business models -is.- Knocking the astronomical fees of pop-stars, actors, and actresses down a few pegs to show them that they're not above the rest of society -is.- Shifting
This means that we'll just have to breed a better guitarist (maybe breed humans with 12 fingers instead of 10, like in the movie Contact -- the 12-fingered pianist) or breed a guitarist with four hands and four arms so that he can play two guitars at once.
And I'm sure that what the world needs right now is more mechanical guitar playing. Because that sounds SO good.
I think he (the article) gets away from the real point of good UI and feature design -- keep it simple and straightforward. Your new whizbang app could have 32,000 features, but if the UI is designed properly and made so that it is easy to understand and is adaptable depending on the user (redefinable toolbars, for example) you can make a program that is powerful and presents itself to most users at a level they can comprehend. The idea that a user shouldn't have to "jump through hoops" to do the most basic of tasks is a good one, and something that designers should adhere to.
Of course, I'm preaching to the choir here.
I do agree with his sentiment about bogging programs down with useless things, though. His example using the encyclopedia is something I would find particularly annoying, although I can see how small children might be amused by such nonsense (especially if that's who the product was designed for). People who design the UIs for these programs should be thinking of usability, not frills. If you want frills, fine, but at least allow us to turn them off.
I can't stand Disneyland. ;)
Milton Babbitt was a mathematician who was on staff at Princeton near the end of the second World War. He managed to make several electronic works that were basically mathematical algorithms run through a processor and "approximated" with conventional notation. His work for solo soprano and tape entitled Philomel is just such a work. If you're behind a university connection, you can probably check out the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and look him up in their online database. Most uni's are part of their subscription service.
Aleatoric music, chance music, etc. The eclectic stuff. Go to your local uni's music library and look up composers like John Cage, George Crumb, Donald Erb, Joseph Schwantner, et al. That's what he meant by funky. The scores are frequently beautiful to look at but are a pain in the ass to read because they DON'T conform to the norm.
Based on what I see from Lilypond's introduction, it isn't capable of producing print music that doesn't conform to that definition of "music" we're so used to. For example, music without a key or time signature, nonstandard key signatures, cutout scores, feathered beaming, ossia measures, etc.
Also, as someone who has done work in engraving and copying print music, Lilypond would need to have a nicer MIDI-compatible interface thrown on top of it to compete. As a file format I think it will work, but as a complete solution it is not viable as it is. No copyist I know would sit down with a text editor and try to copy over scores or parts. It's too cumbersome -- I tried to do it. I had a copy job that I originally tried to do in Lilypond via the text interface and copying one part from the score took almot nine hours of typing, rendering it, fixing it, and re-rendering it to ensure that it came out right. Meanwhile, if I sit down with Finale, I can have it done in an hour.
It's come a long way, but there's a lot of work left to do before it's ready to hit the big time.
Regardless -- feel free to prove me wrong by posting a link to a rendered example of such music. I'd love to be proven wrong in this department.
Would that mean that they'll call the next hardware revision the "Opus?"
You're right - the MECC Curriculum was one of the greatest educational program series ever created. Problem is, all those programs were stored on 5.25" floppies, and we know how careful 2nd graders are with things like that. Worse yet, you can't find the programs available for sale anymore except in second hand shops (or eBay), and I seriously doubt any school district would want to get itself involved in emulation, due to some people seeing it as legally dubious.
School district administrators are very leery of doing business with second-hand places or eBay - to the point that it will probably only happen in a select few places, if at all. The only thing to do is to use 'em if ya got 'em - they are INCREDIBLE educational tools, but their availability is limited, at best.
The other issue is that "eye candy" has become part & parcel in the game world, so kids now expect it. If it's not there, they go "this sucks" and leave it behind. I recently went on a trip with the high school band I student teach to Chicago - I took my iBook, a copy of RockNES, and a few games from my childhood, and I had kids wondering what I was playing, but saying things like "boy, the graphics sure suck - how can you enjoy something like that?"
Gone are the days when, because you could only do so much with graphics, you had to put engaging content in its place. Oregon Trail was an incredible game not for its graphics but for its content. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? was one of the unusual entries that DID have great graphics (for an Apple II) AND had great content. Number Munchers was probably my favorite game, and it wasn't the greatest graphically. Anyway, your idea is great in theory, but from the way I've seen things work at my school, administrators would reject it in a heartbeat. :(
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.
--- Roy Blount, Jr.
...answer the age-old question:
If you're driving the speed of light, what happens when you turn your headlights on?
"Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it.
--- C. P. Scott
If you read the letter they sent Martijn, they mention the following games:
There are some fundamental flaws with several of the titles they mention.
First, 007. This could be one of two things: One, the moron who wrote the letter confused the titles available off the page with the Sega arcade title 005, or two, 007 is a blanket statement for all the games with 007 in the title, of which there are several, are all registered to a Domark Ltd., which is actually a subsidiary of Eidos, which is a member of the IDSA. There ordinarily wouldn't be a problem with this except:C&D letters like this are supposed to explicitly mention the software title being infringed, aren't they? (IANAL!!)
Next, Barbarian. Created by Icon Design, a little tiny software manufacturer that only produced Spectrum titles during the last few years of the system's life. First off, Icon Design doesn't appear to have been bought by anyone, although Namco is a likely candidate considering that the software house produced a version of Rastan for the Spectrum. However, presuming that the software manufacturer was allowed to die on its own and wasn't bought up, the IDSA doesn't have a leg to stand on with this one.
Donkey Kong and Frogger were both licensed. Nintendo and Sega both have no control over the licensed copies. That belongs to the original producers (again, IANAL), and the IDSA has no control again.
Pac-Man, again, was licensed. Namco has no hold on this copy.
Soldier of Fortune is not the version we all know now, but a little known title produced by Firebird Software, which was later folded into British Telecom. Since British Telecom isn't a member of the IDSA, I hardly believe they have control over this title either.
Add to all this the fact that this guy's collected permission letters from individual authors all over the place, I think the IDSA is literally grasping at straws. Makes me wonder if they're really acting on behalf of Nintendo/Sega/Namco/etc., or they're just looking for work.
...sysadmins will begin carrying metronomes and tuners?
"I'm sorry, but your NIC seems to be running a quarter-step sharp."
*hides*
It's very simple - IR keyboards had transmission problems, and they can royally screw up most televisions and VCRs because the codes used to transmit characters/commands from the keyboard to the receiver may be similar to the TV/VCR's code. I recall a friend of mine had an IR keyboard that would mess up the television (selecting random channels, disabling the remote, other nonsense) every time he used it in the vicinity of the TV.
Another problem is that the battery life issue on IR keyboards is much more problematic. IR keyboards last about 1/3 the length of most digital radio keyboards, and frequently take more batteries to operate (the keyboard in the example mentioned earlier took 4 AAs).
Still another problem is the flakiness they get in terms of reception. The keyboard would frequently need to be aimed just right to work properly, and often wouldn't work at distances greater than a couple of feet, which practically defeats the purpose of even having a wireless keyboard. IR keyboards frequently drop characters even at close ranges or input incorrect characters if the receiver misses part of the transmission.
Hope that answers your question.
You are right, there is a MIDI control panel - off the Applications/Utilities folder. It's called "Audio MIDI Setup" and, depending on your hardware setup, will autodetect most MIDI devices. USB devices work best, obviously. Additionally, this little gem of an app includes a complete set of controls for recording/playback devices - it even has a mini software mixer in it. I have some MIDI devices at home which I have not had the chance to test yet, but I can certainly go home and try it out and see what the MIDI devices tab says about the setup. I would guess that you'd probably have to have drivers that support OS 10.2 for everything to work correctly. My Roland SoundCanvas doesn't yet have non-beta drivers for it because they don't really have any OS X native MIDI apps to test it with yet :) (they have beta drivers for 10.1.2 & later but that's about it)
Give most of the major manufacturers about 1 month and there'll probably be some things ready.
...if 20th Century Fox actually talked to the estate managers of Gustav Holst for their use of sections of his Planets Suite or if they figured that they could get away with it by using only about 30 seconds (cut into pieces, no less) of it to get their soundtrack for that X-Men 2 trailer...
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Against it. What he is saying is that television has become such a widely successful marketing tool that companies will pour millions into a tiny 30-second time slot, all to get you to buy their product. Commercials are designed to make you feel as though you are somehow less of a person, less intelligent, or inferior to everyone else unless you buy their products or use their services.
The beer commercial is the classic example of a product that is so constantly associated with a vision that is not even remotely associated with reality. Since when does drinking a beer magically turn you into a stud whom the girls can't resist? As I see it, beer has a nasty tendency to make you slow, stupid, potentially dangerous, and generally repulsive if you aren't careful.
The images that fermion mentions are equally as ludicrous. That's why they're great examples. Taking your kids to McDonalds does not and never will equate to properly loving and caring for your children. Coca-Cola is not synonymous with the American dream. Anyone who believes that drinking Coke will automatically make you successful deserves whatever fate is handed to them.
This is why a recent Ask Slashdot ran chills up my spine. The De Beers diamond cartel designed a series of commercials (none of which are running anymore, thankfully) that actually had the gall to tout the sales pitch "how else can two months salary last a lifetime" when everyone knows that a diamond is not going to keep your marriage intact. Your wife may love it, but if YOU aren't a good husband then no amount of jewels will help.
But then again, we know this. It's the masses who don't.
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That's why I have my student website listed - there's not really a bandwidth penalty. Sure, the IT guys might come knocking and asking what I have stored on my web account, but it's laid right in front of them, and what's a cookbook going to do? Eat them??
I'm not familiar with TeX at all. I am more than willing to post a TeX version, perhaps someone could point me to a good reference, OR be willing to convert it to TeX for me?
So far I have been quite selective in what I've taken -- I've passed over quite a lot of recipes in the comments here. The stuff that's been emailed to me however, looks quite good - I've only sifted through about 25% of it, but nearly everything I got went in. I do plan to test what I can, but my home is a far cry from the Betty Crocker Kitchens, so the ever-present disclaimer of YMMV will be present :)
Anyway, I hope to have a preliminary version up this weekend to give everyone an idea of what the book will look like along with some of the recipes that have already been collected.
And violate the whole reason for doing the project? No way. The original stays open source, even if someone's derivative doesn't.
That's great, but I'm no coder, hence I am at a loss in terms of creating a web database. The only "closed" version will end up being the PDF version, because you can't really "add" to PDFs, even with Acrobat. (if there's some other way, I'd love to know) I'm putting out PDFs because they preserve the formatting and the font-embed routines actually work. The TXT and word document formats are about as open as can be. Of course, the PDF would get updated as I received submissions. I also plan to try to put the project up on freshmeat.net as was suggested to me in an email sent my way.
The whole first few sections of the cookbook is dedicated to basic instructions and what they mean. For the obvious ones, I don't go into detail (like bake) but for the more esoteric ones (like deglazing) I do explain what gets done. Also, at the end there'll be a spice catalog with some information about some major spices that I know of.