could be worse. In the early 600s, Easter as calculated by Patrick's Irish/Celtic church was on a different day some years than the Roman church. In one particularly odd incident, the King of Northumbria celebrated Easter on a different day from his wife.
now, does all that fancy mathematics and statements about the repetition cycle of days include the Leap Year's Lead Day, as well as the fact that it didn't exist the last time this cycle started?
Java Swing (over JWS for remote distribution), pure gnome-less GTK, or some really good Ajax programming which can keep your app from being permanently desktop-confined for that day when someone goes "do you have a web version?" which we're asked *constantly* at my company for our flagship desktop product.
As for either of the two choices mentioned, why worry about the future of them? The libraries are not going to disappear or suddenly "not work" just because someone decides in the future to change their direction.
And Gnome is on a TON of distros, including Fedora, (non-K) Ubuntu, and a lot of the light-weight live distros I've seen.
If you really need the desktop integration features, I would first ask myself why? Why can't I just write a really good application that stands on its own without the need for such tight integration with the containing environment.
which in the case of music is the performance, which is today definitely profitable
I think you're quite deluded on this.
Robert Fripp's label DGMLive (which he is an executive of), had to shell out $5,000 as the final bill to settle the debts that incurred for the League of Crafty Guitarists tour of the United States last year. No King Crimson tour has ever been "profitable", no matter how large or small the venue. Most artists pay for the privilege of playing, with cd sales (and t-shirt sales) being their only operating income to sustain them while they continue to compose and plan subsequent performances.
Fripp: In 2003 the costs of KC for 6 weeks in Europe was c. $1.2 million (given the slide in the $, today that's c. $1.6 million). The work was gruelling, the drives exhausting (Moscow > Riga 20 hours - bump, bump, bump, fucking bump), the audiences & performances (to me) unsatisfying. The musicians were each paid $10,000, or $1,666 a week.
Would you consider $1,666 per week to be profitable? If you could work it all 52 weeks, you'd be making $86K.
But the reality is that for those 6 weeks, two weeks was needed to rehearse, a week needed to sign contracts and settle affairs at home, about 3 weeks on either side where you couldn't perform with anybody else because your head wasn't into the other music (so you'd need rehearsal time there), so now we're looking at $10,000 for 15 weeks, or a mere $667 per week. School teachers get paid more (or should). And that's for not being home for that entire 6 weeks.
Touring is intensely exhausting and is a significant contributor to breakups and divorces among musicians.
Even if you don't tour but work nights locally when you can, it's hardly a living wage. Most bands here in the DC area, no matter how popular, still only get about 12-15 bookings a year, which amounts to about $200/night * 15 shows or a mere $3,000: can you live off of that for a year?
The lawsuit's point is that the iPod, by its numbers is a monopoly device that can thus restrict the sales of competing formats.
The fact that there is the Zune and a thousand other mp3 players that play one or the other format (I've had a NomadIIc that plays WMA files for years) seems irrelevant to them and they, I guess, think they can convince a court or jury that it's irrelevant.
This does, of course, effectively make their lawsuit irrelevant, since no such case could possibly hold up in today's legal climate.
When the market is demanding, and receiving, DRM-free tunes at amazon, iTunes, and a number of smaller label-run sites (Deutsche Grammophon and Naxos, for example), the restrictiveness of one product to not play another's deprecated and irrelevant format is a rather trite thing. As far as I know, there's never been a precedent for "incompatibility" unless there's a contract violation clause to attach it to.
If they really want to solve the incompatibility problem, they should go out and sue HD-DVD and Blu-Ray device makers for not making players that can read both formats. Or how about a video game maker that only makes his games on PS2 and not on XBox or WII? or the other end, how about suing Microsoft for not being able to play Sony PS2 games...
1) Driving at 40 miles an hour down an empty, open street at 4:30am, with a 30 speed limit.
There's more to speed limits than just speed. There's also noise.
Here in Sterling, VA, the main street, a widely divided 4-lane road with only a few stoplights that late at night are almost always green, the speed limit is 30. The very same road half a mile further south, with just as much traffic and lights, is 45.
The reason for the difference?
Residential zoning. Not for kids or pedestrians crossing the street (nobody bothers). But simple noise. Drivers coasting through at 35 (everyone's at least 5 over the limit anyways) make a lot less noise than drivers racing through at 50.
Personally, I've always been of the "if you don't like the noise, move" philosophy, but today's housing market doesn't support such an ideal.
I did mention both of your items, albeit more concisely if not entirely grammatically correct.:)
Now, given that the record label decides, through their "advance", that they still own the copyrights on your work even though in the end you pay off the advance (through recouped royalties) and therefore pay for the record, is slavery pure and simple, there are aspects of this model that are certainly unethical on their part.
Robert Fripp: "My only substantial criticism of Steve's commentary is that it paints the music industry in too positive a light."
Besides, if the 2nd doesn't recoup (it won't), you might not even get a 3rd, but still owe on the advance for it. The labels say they just "eat" those losses instead of insisting that advances be paid back for unmade or unfinished records ("No one's going to jail for it.", as Tom Hanks says in the studio scene in That Thing You Do). It's a reason ASCAP is always in better shape than any particular label or the RIAA - they get (to steal) money no matter what happens and have no reason, no costs other than accountants, lawyers, and extortioners, to ever lose money.
The MPAA is just as bad as the RIAA - see the current lawsuit where Newline's accountants insist that Lord of the Rings hasn't turned profit yet and thus are withholding money from Peter Jackson (hence, no Hobbit).
Why should a band suck up to RIAA members when they can record their own tunes, set up their own sales and distribution, and collect all the proceeds from the people who appreciate what they've produced.
Because sounding GOOD still costs a LOT of money. Getting a decent producer and engineer who can take the raw recordings and get a really good polished mix that will actually sell to people who don't know you is expensive. Replacing inconsistent $100 "garage-band" pedals with decent $1000 models that can be more precisely tuned to match the tone of your drum kit and lead singer's timber and the particular nuances of the keyboard rig is expensive. Getting the right digital sampler sequencer stuff if you like doing loop work is expensive.
Having the time to actually practice 8 hours a day by not having to work a day job is expensive.
Having your own studio, where you can work on your material when the mood strikes and not have to pre-plan and rent and have a very limited window with which everything has to be laid down is expensive.
Being able to actually tour to areas where they haven't heard of you yet, as opposed to being stuck as a bar band in Charleston, SC, is expensive.
These are the things a record company's "advance" gives you.
These are the things that no amount of self-run online promotions and sales can give you unless you're already popular and have a large following willing to pay, IN ADVANCE, to hear and see you (see Marillion).
Now, given that the record label decides, through their "advance", that they still own the copyrights on your work even though in the end you pay off the advance (through recouped royalties) and therefore pay for the record, is slavery pure and simple, there are aspects of this model that are certainly unethical on their part.
But just dropping the labels entirely is not going to solve that expense problem. Making a decent cd you can sell at your bar gigs is reasonably cheap, but it's not going to get rid of the day job. To be a professional musician, you have to think like a business and worry about incoming funds and outgoing funds and then you realize that the "decent cd" is not nearly polished enough. The 80/20 rule all software developers know all too well applies here: the last 20% of an album's quality will take about 80% of your time and money, or 4 times as much as just laying down the tracks to make the initial 80%. That decent CD was 80% - a real release that can get you noticed across the country is going to cost a LOT more.
Well, we won't know 'til the Platinum Edition DVD comes out in March of next year, though as far as I know they didn't remove anything in the first DVD release 6 years ago.
But on the other hand, in Melody Time (or was it Make Mine Music) they digitally removed ALL references to the cigar that Pecos Bill was smoking throughout that entire segment.
It seems mostly that only the Treasures releases are guaranteed to be uncut, yet even then, they added a "professional stunt person, don't try this at home" subtitle throughout the Tahitian fire dances and fire walking (when they didn't add such a disclaimer to the very same dance as drawn in Lilo and Stitch, likely to be seen by far more children than the Disneyland TV segment from 45 years ago).
as others said, nowhere does the article say the *daughter* found it difficult. Mom was complaining that it was too difficult, not that the daughter saw it that way.
Why should artists remain with them in this scenario?
Because there's more to the record label promotional engine than just getting the stuff in the stores.
When "all things are done as they should be", the label gets you on a larger tour than just your local region, often opening for a much larger band that the label also manages; the label gets you on a network tv show (like Leno or Today); the label gets your video on what few video stations/shows are still on the air; the label (still) uses payola schemes to get you on the radio (which in spite of EVERYTHING that sucks about it, it still remains the #1 way of getting music heard and thus purchased).
granted, in spite of the fact that the label owns 88% of your record, they will still take as many of these expenses out of your "recouped from royalties" in order to guarantee that your record never makes a profit and they never have to actually account for you, but that's the Labels' side of the Faustian bargain that is the modern record contract, unchanged since the labels first looked at Elvis and said "hey, we could get rich too if we figure out how to clone this guy...".
that's also a big IF on whether or not they'll do any of that at all - with label heads and middle-managers changing on a daily basis in that hollywood-esque hell, chances are that half way through making the album, your AR man has been fired and you won't get shit for support and will be lucky if they even let you keep the recordings you've made to sell (for points, of course) to another label.
It matters when eventually crap quality recordings will be the only way for GOOD music to appear as well. Granted, an artist in some control over his future can continue to use FLAC or WAV/CD-DR (or SACD or high-bit DVD-A) to release their material, but the expense of that and the inability to sell it through the same channels that other music is purchased through (as stores that carried "the good stuff" like Tower continue to disappear and stores like Borders and BN have their in-store stock slashed to make way for more dvds of tv shows nobody watches anymore) will eventually get in the way.
In short, whoever the hell wrote this book is an idiot, completely ignoring WHO in England actually started the revolution. They may have been middle class at the time of the steam engine, but they got that way through hard work over the previous 120 years building up a textile industry in the hills. And though we might call them middle class by our standards, at the time they were a repressed population, second-class citizens, more lowly than the east-ender Londonite 'cause at least that poor man in London was of the King's faith.
How 'bout this - The hillsides of England, Wales, and lowland Scotland became the home for many dissenters, non-Anglicans and non-Catholics, whose Calvanistic philosophies required that they make something better of themselves and entered into the textile market at precisely the right time to take over control from Flanders where the monks had dominated the industry for centuries. With the help of money from dissenter investors like Lloyds, they were able to finance and build small empires just waiting for another dissenter, James Watt, to come up with a steam engine design that would allow them to move the whole thing down into the cities. Then combine that with the assembly line idea (also from another dissenter), and BOOM!
The point of this is that *incentive* is a major factor and the nobility in England never had any incentive to do anything, and the upper middle classes of England were colonial financers and traders, empire builders managing the monopoly of shipping they effectively bought from Holland when they offered them the crown of England in 1688. The British East India Trading Company used to be the *Dutch* East India Trading Company. These people were still making tons off of raw supplies through the Caribbean sugar plantations and trade with America (in spite of losing the monopoly there) and were starting their trade empires with South Africa, India, and China. They had no need to manufacture goods in England - it was cheaper to buy them.
The dissenters of England, who had next to no rights at all EXCEPT when it came to money, property and inheritance, and driven by a religious work-ethic never seen before, were the ones who created the revolution. They're the ones who *needed* to create it because they had no way otherwise of getting into the rich middle class's trading empire.
You don't make a revolution by accident. You make a revolution out of necessity. Either having it or creating it.
well, nobody except scientists need to really understand darwinian evolution, but by not teaching the realities of science, biology or physics, early and forcing people to understand it, we create a generation where there will be no more scientists because they won't have the basics handled by the time they need it.
as long as we keep saying "i don't *need* science", we are also saying "my children won't *need* science, so we might as well not bother to teach it". which is exactly what the religious nutcases in the country want. trust me, they'd be perfectly willing to teach biblical-based geocentricism if they thought they could get away with it.
it took us 400 years to overcome that once church absolutism kicked in during the 1100s. how long will it take the next time around?
we're not doing "massive calculus" when we throw a curve or catch a fly ball. we're doing "extremely rapid estimates and corrections". we're doing MUCH simpler maths, maths we can perform very rapidly by responding to changes in perspective as we move or as the thing we're trying to catch moves.
in fact, computer responses to visual and radar signals is finally fast enough (see motion-capture animation) that its finally possible to actually program a computer to catch by constantly-correcting guesses rather than trying to program all the physical calculus in it.
in fact, it was trusting our ability to guess when we caught something that made our brains so easy to be fooled by the "heavier objects fall faster" falacy. no brain ever *calculated* automagically that they'd drop at the same time: we had to be shown how much our imagination (as expressed by those rapid estimates) was wrong compared to reality.
Remember that infamous "7 +- 2", the general capacity of human short term memory (our equiv of registers in the cpu). It fits here, too. 80 columns averages 7 +- 2 words on a line and is about what we can read normally. Any more words per line and reading is difficult.
It's a reason textbooks have sidebars rather than using up the whole page. (Not the only reason, of course - the gloss is one such invention from the late middle ages and education has kept that pattern since, but the pattern works because it also keeps the number of words on a line down).
Now, much of our reading may be due to conditioning (we're trained to read lines like that) and tradition than anything else, and coming up with a controlled experiment to support my idea here is next to impossible, but I think there's some truth to it.
keep moding this up. i just read the summary and went "prolog, anyone?".
Even if he manages to create the "expression language" required to program in his "expression" style, that still has to be implemented in an algorithmic form as an interpretation at *some* level, unless he's going to rebuild the computer from scratch at the very chip level and create his "expression" chip and "expression" motherboard and "expression" memory and "expression" bus and "expression" long-term storage.
I'd love to know how his expression-based system is going to wait for the memory fetch to actually return before he can express something else.
Truth is, in order to have his expression-based system work, things have to be instantaneous. They're not, and never will be. In effect, he's given me the impression he's spoiled on speed. We're fast, DAMN fast, but we're still ordered and the cpu is still waiting on stuff before it can make its next calculation and how to wait is an algorithmic process and always will be.
otherwise, he's creating a very inefficient way to express himself.
Except that the whole idea of an encryption algorithm, of creating an "algebra of characters" is itself a mathematical concept. The trouble is is understanding how mathematics so pervades it that even the most basic CS stuff is doing math regardless of whether or not the programmer knows it.
The trouble is whether or not one considers Logic as mathematics. I do and so does every mathematician out there. It's boolean algebra and the rules that are created are created with exactly the same discipline that informs any other algebra in mathematics. You can't escape it.
Now you can program without "thinking" that you're doing mathematics all you want, but mathematics in its pure glory is what you're doing.
they won't look at your GPA necessarily for hiring, but it does play into what your starting salary will be and you'll have to work harder to prove you're worth the same money that others get.
or at least, that was my experience 15 years ago (back before geeks were the valued commodity we are today). I was making a 4th of my current salary, which I thought was reflective of my 2.83/4 (with 3.4 in CS classes).
Dylan's comments are anecdotal at best in any case, and likely mucked up by expectation bias.
personally, i can hear vinyl sounding warmer: the first time.
by the 10th time, i can already hear the pops and clicks of overplaying, no matter what the needle. in many cases, i had records that already had minute pops and clicks on them straight out of the store.
really, i don't think dylan's really thinking of the vinyl output so much as his memories of the master analog tapes during the mastering process, which of course won't have any of the damage that the vinyl will inevitably suffer.
I downloaded Safari for two reasons. One, mere curiosity. I just wanted a sense of what a browser looks and acts like when there's no right mouse menu, limited menu choices, etc.
But the real reason is that I do web applications and web site programming and nobody in my company has a Mac. I used it to test whether or not the DHTML/AJAX, CSS, and other browser-conflicting codes we used will actually still work, based on the assumption that what I saw in Safari for Windows would be what Safari for Mac would see.
Fortunately, I didn't see any problems in my code that needed to be dealt with. It rendered and ran everything correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
could be worse. In the early 600s, Easter as calculated by Patrick's Irish/Celtic church was on a different day some years than the Roman church. In one particularly odd incident, the King of Northumbria celebrated Easter on a different day from his wife.
The Council of Whitby resolved this, supposedly.
now, does all that fancy mathematics and statements about the repetition cycle of days include the Leap Year's Lead Day, as well as the fact that it didn't exist the last time this cycle started?
...on my Windows Media Player for Linux.
Java Swing (over JWS for remote distribution), pure gnome-less GTK, or some really good Ajax programming which can keep your app from being permanently desktop-confined for that day when someone goes "do you have a web version?" which we're asked *constantly* at my company for our flagship desktop product.
As for either of the two choices mentioned, why worry about the future of them? The libraries are not going to disappear or suddenly "not work" just because someone decides in the future to change their direction.
And Gnome is on a TON of distros, including Fedora, (non-K) Ubuntu, and a lot of the light-weight live distros I've seen.
If you really need the desktop integration features, I would first ask myself why? Why can't I just write a really good application that stands on its own without the need for such tight integration with the containing environment.
which in the case of music is the performance, which is today definitely profitable
I think you're quite deluded on this.
Robert Fripp's label DGMLive (which he is an executive of), had to shell out $5,000 as the final bill to settle the debts that incurred for the League of Crafty Guitarists tour of the United States last year. No King Crimson tour has ever been "profitable", no matter how large or small the venue. Most artists pay for the privilege of playing, with cd sales (and t-shirt sales) being their only operating income to sustain them while they continue to compose and plan subsequent performances.
Fripp: In 2003 the costs of KC for 6 weeks in Europe was c. $1.2 million (given the slide in the $, today that's c. $1.6 million). The work was gruelling, the drives exhausting (Moscow > Riga 20 hours - bump, bump, bump, fucking bump), the audiences & performances (to me) unsatisfying. The musicians were each paid $10,000, or $1,666 a week.
Would you consider $1,666 per week to be profitable? If you could work it all 52 weeks, you'd be making $86K.
But the reality is that for those 6 weeks, two weeks was needed to rehearse, a week needed to sign contracts and settle affairs at home, about 3 weeks on either side where you couldn't perform with anybody else because your head wasn't into the other music (so you'd need rehearsal time there), so now we're looking at $10,000 for 15 weeks, or a mere $667 per week. School teachers get paid more (or should). And that's for not being home for that entire 6 weeks.
Touring is intensely exhausting and is a significant contributor to breakups and divorces among musicians.
Even if you don't tour but work nights locally when you can, it's hardly a living wage. Most bands here in the DC area, no matter how popular, still only get about 12-15 bookings a year, which amounts to about $200/night * 15 shows or a mere $3,000: can you live off of that for a year?
It's not like the Zune plays protected AAC files.
The lawsuit's point is that the iPod, by its numbers is a monopoly device that can thus restrict the sales of competing formats.
The fact that there is the Zune and a thousand other mp3 players that play one or the other format (I've had a NomadIIc that plays WMA files for years) seems irrelevant to them and they, I guess, think they can convince a court or jury that it's irrelevant.
This does, of course, effectively make their lawsuit irrelevant, since no such case could possibly hold up in today's legal climate.
When the market is demanding, and receiving, DRM-free tunes at amazon, iTunes, and a number of smaller label-run sites (Deutsche Grammophon and Naxos, for example), the restrictiveness of one product to not play another's deprecated and irrelevant format is a rather trite thing. As far as I know, there's never been a precedent for "incompatibility" unless there's a contract violation clause to attach it to.
If they really want to solve the incompatibility problem, they should go out and sue HD-DVD and Blu-Ray device makers for not making players that can read both formats. Or how about a video game maker that only makes his games on PS2 and not on XBox or WII? or the other end, how about suing Microsoft for not being able to play Sony PS2 games...
1) Driving at 40 miles an hour down an empty, open street at 4:30am, with a 30 speed limit.
There's more to speed limits than just speed. There's also noise.
Here in Sterling, VA, the main street, a widely divided 4-lane road with only a few stoplights that late at night are almost always green, the speed limit is 30. The very same road half a mile further south, with just as much traffic and lights, is 45.
The reason for the difference?
Residential zoning. Not for kids or pedestrians crossing the street (nobody bothers). But simple noise. Drivers coasting through at 35 (everyone's at least 5 over the limit anyways) make a lot less noise than drivers racing through at 50.
Personally, I've always been of the "if you don't like the noise, move" philosophy, but today's housing market doesn't support such an ideal.
I did mention both of your items, albeit more concisely if not entirely grammatically correct. :)
Now, given that the record label decides, through their "advance", that they still own the copyrights on your work even though in the end you pay off the advance (through recouped royalties) and therefore pay for the record, is slavery pure and simple, there are aspects of this model that are certainly unethical on their part.
Robert Fripp: "My only substantial criticism of Steve's commentary is that it paints the music industry in too positive a light."
Besides, if the 2nd doesn't recoup (it won't), you might not even get a 3rd, but still owe on the advance for it. The labels say they just "eat" those losses instead of insisting that advances be paid back for unmade or unfinished records ("No one's going to jail for it.", as Tom Hanks says in the studio scene in That Thing You Do). It's a reason ASCAP is always in better shape than any particular label or the RIAA - they get (to steal) money no matter what happens and have no reason, no costs other than accountants, lawyers, and extortioners, to ever lose money.
The MPAA is just as bad as the RIAA - see the current lawsuit where Newline's accountants insist that Lord of the Rings hasn't turned profit yet and thus are withholding money from Peter Jackson (hence, no Hobbit).
Why should a band suck up to RIAA members when they can record their own tunes, set up their own sales and distribution, and collect all the proceeds from the people who appreciate what they've produced.
Because sounding GOOD still costs a LOT of money. Getting a decent producer and engineer who can take the raw recordings and get a really good polished mix that will actually sell to people who don't know you is expensive. Replacing inconsistent $100 "garage-band" pedals with decent $1000 models that can be more precisely tuned to match the tone of your drum kit and lead singer's timber and the particular nuances of the keyboard rig is expensive. Getting the right digital sampler sequencer stuff if you like doing loop work is expensive.
Having the time to actually practice 8 hours a day by not having to work a day job is expensive.
Having your own studio, where you can work on your material when the mood strikes and not have to pre-plan and rent and have a very limited window with which everything has to be laid down is expensive.
Being able to actually tour to areas where they haven't heard of you yet, as opposed to being stuck as a bar band in Charleston, SC, is expensive.
These are the things a record company's "advance" gives you.
These are the things that no amount of self-run online promotions and sales can give you unless you're already popular and have a large following willing to pay, IN ADVANCE, to hear and see you (see Marillion).
Now, given that the record label decides, through their "advance", that they still own the copyrights on your work even though in the end you pay off the advance (through recouped royalties) and therefore pay for the record, is slavery pure and simple, there are aspects of this model that are certainly unethical on their part.
But just dropping the labels entirely is not going to solve that expense problem. Making a decent cd you can sell at your bar gigs is reasonably cheap, but it's not going to get rid of the day job. To be a professional musician, you have to think like a business and worry about incoming funds and outgoing funds and then you realize that the "decent cd" is not nearly polished enough. The 80/20 rule all software developers know all too well applies here: the last 20% of an album's quality will take about 80% of your time and money, or 4 times as much as just laying down the tracks to make the initial 80%. That decent CD was 80% - a real release that can get you noticed across the country is going to cost a LOT more.
Well, we won't know 'til the Platinum Edition DVD comes out in March of next year, though as far as I know they didn't remove anything in the first DVD release 6 years ago.
But on the other hand, in Melody Time (or was it Make Mine Music) they digitally removed ALL references to the cigar that Pecos Bill was smoking throughout that entire segment.
It seems mostly that only the Treasures releases are guaranteed to be uncut, yet even then, they added a "professional stunt person, don't try this at home" subtitle throughout the Tahitian fire dances and fire walking (when they didn't add such a disclaimer to the very same dance as drawn in Lilo and Stitch, likely to be seen by far more children than the Disneyland TV segment from 45 years ago).
as others said, nowhere does the article say the *daughter* found it difficult. Mom was complaining that it was too difficult, not that the daughter saw it that way.
Kid probably found it to be no problem at all...
you have made it clear you consider the two actions - Buying and stealing - equivalent
"Property is theft, right? Therefore theft is property, therefore this ship is mine." -- Zaphod Beeblebrox
Why should artists remain with them in this scenario?
Because there's more to the record label promotional engine than just getting the stuff in the stores.
When "all things are done as they should be", the label gets you on a larger tour than just your local region, often opening for a much larger band that the label also manages; the label gets you on a network tv show (like Leno or Today); the label gets your video on what few video stations/shows are still on the air; the label (still) uses payola schemes to get you on the radio (which in spite of EVERYTHING that sucks about it, it still remains the #1 way of getting music heard and thus purchased).
granted, in spite of the fact that the label owns 88% of your record, they will still take as many of these expenses out of your "recouped from royalties" in order to guarantee that your record never makes a profit and they never have to actually account for you, but that's the Labels' side of the Faustian bargain that is the modern record contract, unchanged since the labels first looked at Elvis and said "hey, we could get rich too if we figure out how to clone this guy...".
that's also a big IF on whether or not they'll do any of that at all - with label heads and middle-managers changing on a daily basis in that hollywood-esque hell, chances are that half way through making the album, your AR man has been fired and you won't get shit for support and will be lucky if they even let you keep the recordings you've made to sell (for points, of course) to another label.
It matters when eventually crap quality recordings will be the only way for GOOD music to appear as well. Granted, an artist in some control over his future can continue to use FLAC or WAV/CD-DR (or SACD or high-bit DVD-A) to release their material, but the expense of that and the inability to sell it through the same channels that other music is purchased through (as stores that carried "the good stuff" like Tower continue to disappear and stores like Borders and BN have their in-store stock slashed to make way for more dvds of tv shows nobody watches anymore) will eventually get in the way.
In short, whoever the hell wrote this book is an idiot, completely ignoring WHO in England actually started the revolution. They may have been middle class at the time of the steam engine, but they got that way through hard work over the previous 120 years building up a textile industry in the hills. And though we might call them middle class by our standards, at the time they were a repressed population, second-class citizens, more lowly than the east-ender Londonite 'cause at least that poor man in London was of the King's faith.
How 'bout this - The hillsides of England, Wales, and lowland Scotland became the home for many dissenters, non-Anglicans and non-Catholics, whose Calvanistic philosophies required that they make something better of themselves and entered into the textile market at precisely the right time to take over control from Flanders where the monks had dominated the industry for centuries. With the help of money from dissenter investors like Lloyds, they were able to finance and build small empires just waiting for another dissenter, James Watt, to come up with a steam engine design that would allow them to move the whole thing down into the cities. Then combine that with the assembly line idea (also from another dissenter), and BOOM!
The point of this is that *incentive* is a major factor and the nobility in England never had any incentive to do anything, and the upper middle classes of England were colonial financers and traders, empire builders managing the monopoly of shipping they effectively bought from Holland when they offered them the crown of England in 1688. The British East India Trading Company used to be the *Dutch* East India Trading Company. These people were still making tons off of raw supplies through the Caribbean sugar plantations and trade with America (in spite of losing the monopoly there) and were starting their trade empires with South Africa, India, and China. They had no need to manufacture goods in England - it was cheaper to buy them.
The dissenters of England, who had next to no rights at all EXCEPT when it came to money, property and inheritance, and driven by a religious work-ethic never seen before, were the ones who created the revolution. They're the ones who *needed* to create it because they had no way otherwise of getting into the rich middle class's trading empire.
You don't make a revolution by accident. You make a revolution out of necessity. Either having it or creating it.
well, nobody except scientists need to really understand darwinian evolution, but by not teaching the realities of science, biology or physics, early and forcing people to understand it, we create a generation where there will be no more scientists because they won't have the basics handled by the time they need it.
as long as we keep saying "i don't *need* science", we are also saying "my children won't *need* science, so we might as well not bother to teach it". which is exactly what the religious nutcases in the country want. trust me, they'd be perfectly willing to teach biblical-based geocentricism if they thought they could get away with it.
it took us 400 years to overcome that once church absolutism kicked in during the 1100s. how long will it take the next time around?
we're not doing "massive calculus" when we throw a curve or catch a fly ball. we're doing "extremely rapid estimates and corrections". we're doing MUCH simpler maths, maths we can perform very rapidly by responding to changes in perspective as we move or as the thing we're trying to catch moves.
in fact, computer responses to visual and radar signals is finally fast enough (see motion-capture animation) that its finally possible to actually program a computer to catch by constantly-correcting guesses rather than trying to program all the physical calculus in it.
in fact, it was trusting our ability to guess when we caught something that made our brains so easy to be fooled by the "heavier objects fall faster" falacy. no brain ever *calculated* automagically that they'd drop at the same time: we had to be shown how much our imagination (as expressed by those rapid estimates) was wrong compared to reality.
Remember that infamous "7 +- 2", the general capacity of human short term memory (our equiv of registers in the cpu). It fits here, too. 80 columns averages 7 +- 2 words on a line and is about what we can read normally. Any more words per line and reading is difficult.
It's a reason textbooks have sidebars rather than using up the whole page. (Not the only reason, of course - the gloss is one such invention from the late middle ages and education has kept that pattern since, but the pattern works because it also keeps the number of words on a line down).
Now, much of our reading may be due to conditioning (we're trained to read lines like that) and tradition than anything else, and coming up with a controlled experiment to support my idea here is next to impossible, but I think there's some truth to it.
keep moding this up. i just read the summary and went "prolog, anyone?".
Even if he manages to create the "expression language" required to program in his "expression" style, that still has to be implemented in an algorithmic form as an interpretation at *some* level, unless he's going to rebuild the computer from scratch at the very chip level and create his "expression" chip and "expression" motherboard and "expression" memory and "expression" bus and "expression" long-term storage.
I'd love to know how his expression-based system is going to wait for the memory fetch to actually return before he can express something else.
Truth is, in order to have his expression-based system work, things have to be instantaneous. They're not, and never will be. In effect, he's given me the impression he's spoiled on speed. We're fast, DAMN fast, but we're still ordered and the cpu is still waiting on stuff before it can make its next calculation and how to wait is an algorithmic process and always will be.
otherwise, he's creating a very inefficient way to express himself.
Except that the whole idea of an encryption algorithm, of creating an "algebra of characters" is itself a mathematical concept. The trouble is is understanding how mathematics so pervades it that even the most basic CS stuff is doing math regardless of whether or not the programmer knows it.
The trouble is whether or not one considers Logic as mathematics. I do and so does every mathematician out there. It's boolean algebra and the rules that are created are created with exactly the same discipline that informs any other algebra in mathematics. You can't escape it.
Now you can program without "thinking" that you're doing mathematics all you want, but mathematics in its pure glory is what you're doing.
they won't look at your GPA necessarily for hiring, but it does play into what your starting salary will be and you'll have to work harder to prove you're worth the same money that others get.
or at least, that was my experience 15 years ago (back before geeks were the valued commodity we are today). I was making a 4th of my current salary, which I thought was reflective of my 2.83/4 (with 3.4 in CS classes).
Dylan's comments are anecdotal at best in any case, and likely mucked up by expectation bias.
personally, i can hear vinyl sounding warmer: the first time.
by the 10th time, i can already hear the pops and clicks of overplaying, no matter what the needle. in many cases, i had records that already had minute pops and clicks on them straight out of the store.
really, i don't think dylan's really thinking of the vinyl output so much as his memories of the master analog tapes during the mastering process, which of course won't have any of the damage that the vinyl will inevitably suffer.
I downloaded Safari for two reasons. One, mere curiosity. I just wanted a sense of what a browser looks and acts like when there's no right mouse menu, limited menu choices, etc.
But the real reason is that I do web applications and web site programming and nobody in my company has a Mac. I used it to test whether or not the DHTML/AJAX, CSS, and other browser-conflicting codes we used will actually still work, based on the assumption that what I saw in Safari for Windows would be what Safari for Mac would see.
Fortunately, I didn't see any problems in my code that needed to be dealt with. It rendered and ran everything correctly.