As somebody who has perfect pitch, I completely agree with the statement that different keys have different colors to them. For example, when Bach wrote his "Magnificat" he did it for a church who hired him for the gig, but they wanted it in the key of E flat, which is a ridiculously boring key. After he was done with it, he changed it to the key of D Major, which is what he'd wanted to put it in in the first place. Makes a WORLD of difference.
Hell, I wish I'D kept my copy of Grout, rather than either selling it for beer or burying it somewhere.:)
There's more than once since graduation that I'd wanted to look up something about a composer or time period and realized that I can't remember if I sold my book or if I just lost track of it. I still wonder if I'll come across it down in my parents' basement or something, although I'm pretty sure it was got rid of for beer rather than saved for posterity.
Grout is the standard, though; that's for sure. I still remember my music theory teacher seeing it when I started taking Music History, and hearing him recite the entire first paragraph from memory from when he'd taken it years before... And that first paragraph still hadn't changed a bit since then.
Something like a biopic of Mohammed Ali perhaps?;)
Y'know, it's funny that you mentioned Ali, because I haven't seen it. It had completely slipped my mind; I had wanted to see it, but it just happened to be one of those films that slipped through the cracks for me.
I couldn't agree more. Just because someone chooses to make drivel doesn't mean that they can't produce a real, down-to-earth piece of cinema. Take Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, for example. I knew that Jim Carrey could be a phenomenal dramatic actor from the first time I saw him in Ace Ventura. And he proved me right when he did The Majestic, which is one of my favorite movies of all time--despite its overly sappy plot and political beatings over the head. And Robin Williams, who for a long time got away with doing his normal schtick routine, has done a number of wonderful dramatic movies, one of which is--appropriately for this topic--Bicentennial Man. Good Will Hunting, Death to Smoochy (though that one wasn't so much dramatic), One Hour Photo, Awakenings, Dead Poets Society... the list goes on.
I would love to see Will Smith in another good dramatic role. As much as I liked Men In Black, I think he has a lot more potential than that.
Has the RIAA threatened to kill you or your familiy?
Try ousting them from their seats of power and see how quickly you might find out that they WILL do this.
It reminds me of a story a couple months back I saw about creating synthetic diamonds that were virtually identical to diamonds found in the earth, and on top of it were far cheaper. I remember remarking to my father at lunch one day that the person who had invented that technology had better watch his back, because he might find himself with a bullet in it if he wasn't wary of the diamon cartels.
The RIAA is just another cartel, and its actions are just as violent, if not in actuality then in principle. It will downright bury anything it doesn't want around, and we all know it can do it. They avoid being called a monopoly because they don't take a direct approach to media ownership, but in truth it's all a front and we know it.
Like any other unionized organization, it doesn't represent its members--it represents itself, and its number one interest isn't that of its members, but rather of the RIAA itself. The sooner we can get rid of that, the more likely it is that true capitalism will start working for the consumers and the sellers.
I'd much rather have a more intelligent game design where I can see the monsters moving around the "map" or the "town", and if you touch one, the battle starts (like some RPGs).
Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest tried doing this and it was an abysmal failure. Of course, the game was horrible and way too easy, so that may have had something to do with it.
What I've played of Xenosaga uses this as well, though in a much better way: you can outrun a monster or outsmart it, but sometimes you have no choice but to fight them.
The biggest problem that I have with random encounters is what I'm running into now with Final Fantasy 9. The monsters are either way too easy and don't give you enough experience, or they're way too hard and you have to spend inordinate amounts of money to stock up on Potions to keep yourself alive; the battles take several minutes to complete and a level-up doesn't give you enough to keep up with the monsters. Leveling up takes hours, sometimes, and you MUST do it in order to keep up with the levels of the monsters you have to fight as you go through the game.
My solution is this, and has been used in a couple games in the past, though mostly in spell form, I believe. They should find a way to enable it so that you shouldn't have to fight monsters that are vastly weaker than you. These types of battles are just a waste of time and you shouldn't have to fight them unless you choose to. So here would be my suggestion:
If my level is 25, and I hit a random encounter, the game does a quick calculation of what type of monster I would be fighting. If the monster I would be fighting is of a level far lower than mine, then I don't hit the encounter. That way, I only fight monsters that are at my level or more powerful. However, rather than having the same number of battles, but this time with only high-level monsters (which makes it VERY tough to get to the next town so you can buy more Potions), the calculation would make sure that the number of battles would stay lower because the number of hypothetical battles stays the same, only those with the weak monsters don't happen. So this way, you fight less battles, but they're more difficult. It makes leveling up that much better because the battles you do fight are more meaningful and less tedious.
Actually, only New York has banned the practice. And even then, they only ban the use of handheld cellphones; if you have a hands-free device, it's perfectly legal.
However, it is important to note that studies have shown that there's no actual added safety when using a hands-free device as opposed to holding the cellphone in your hand. It's apparently the act of talking, rather than the holding the cellphone up to one's ear, that causes the real distraction from the road.
I don't know about anybody else, though, but when I'm talking on the phone in my car (hands-free or not), the phone conversation is usually what suffers, not my driving ability. Of course, my driving ability probably does go down and I just don't notice it, but I'm far more likely to miss what was said on the phone rather than take my eyes off the road or pay more attention with my ears.
I heard someone suggest that most of the "OS"es in movies are simply flash programs that are full screen, and will do the correct sequence of events, regardless of the input. Can anyone verify this?
I remember reading that in American Pie they did this with the whole webcam thing when they were watching Shannon Elizabeth take her clothes off.:) The operating system they were running was actually Linux made to look like Mac OS 8/9, and they created a program that would take input from the keyboard and mouse and, no matter what was done, would make it do a set sequence of events.
FLSA dictates that unpaid overtime is illegal. Unless they're exempt employees, they should be billing for that time.
There are always unforeseen circumstances that happen on the way to work. Just today, for example, I saw a woman on the side of the road whose car was on fire, or smoking, or something. I would have stopped, but two things occurred to me: (1) I was far enough away that backing up in the left breakdown lane scared the bejeezus out of me, and (2) I didn't want to be late for work.
Ironic, isn't it? My boss most certainly would have understood, especially because I was here until 12:15 last night working on a server. But I was actually worried about it.
I understand that being on time is an important asset, and I'm not saying that it's okay to just waltz into the building whenever you want. But if you're five minutes late because there was an accident on the highway, or you blew a flat tire, there's no reason they should be upset. And ESPECIALLY not if you were only one minute late. How many clocks in a company do you know are synchronized anyway? Who's to say that their clock isn't fast?
I don't know about you, but to me, YRO posts are the most important out of all tech stories. Privacy and speech are going to be the next huge battles fought in government, and it's going to be a big war, one that we'll all have to fight. I would hardly call any of the YRO posts "minor."
Yes, but even if they are monitoring "piracy" as they would inevitably claim, they are profiting from that. So, in a sense, they are profiting from piracy, which they have always denied in the first place. Because they can use the statistics of piracy to help sell more albums (which, ironically, goes against what they say about how piracy prevents sales in the first place--what was that? You sell more albums when you put the more popular stuff on sale? Look at that!), they'll have a difficult time trying to tell the courts that there is no legitimate use for file-swapping.
You clearly don't know anyone living with a disability.
I'll give you an opportunity to take your foot out of your mouth. That was an incredibly not-thought-out statement.
Yes, of COURSE I've known people who live with disabilities. I grew up with them in school, worked with them directly, and have them in my family.
And you know what? I've never once met a disabled person who feels sorry for him- or herself to a point where they would make a big deal about HOW they were referred to. Most disabled persons would be glad enough that legislators even take the time out of their day to deal with them in the first place.
Calling them "disabled people" instead of "people with disabilities" is just more politically correct bullshit that doesn't do anything to change the real opinions of people. Saying "people with disabilities" no more makes people think of them in a different way than saying "person with homosexual preferences" instead of "gay person" would make somebody think differently of them.
I prefer to call a spade a spade and TREAT them as people rather than just pay them lip service that way.
Forgive my use of the colloquialism, given the fact that it was so apparent from the context of what I was saying that I was really inferring the fact that they could, indeed, care less.
Y'know, for people who have to overcome absurdly high hurdles and who generally come out unscatched, people sure make a big deal about their feelings. Most "people with disabilities" could care less what you called them.
It reminds me of how people make such a big deal about calling Indians "Native Americans" when, in fact, they're entirely wrong about why they're called "Indians" in the first place, and they seem to completely remove the opinions of the involved parties, who are perfectly fine with being called "Indians."
You forget that 80% of computer users (and 99% of elderly computer users) don't even know how to change the text size in their browser. Hell, a lot of them don't even know how to set their homepage.
So make it really easy for them and include a link on the page to change the font size larger or smaller. It's easy to do and it makes the choice very easy for them.
I'm a firm believer in taking a little extra time to make the viewer's job a little easier. It works in programming and it works in webpage coding as well.
I have coworkers on Slashdot? I thought I was the only one who was a member here...:)
Seriously, though, this describes my company to a tee. They just don't GET the fact that we can't spread ourselves too thin and work on fifty different projects at once--especially because we just got rid of an IT guy here. And yet there are still a hundred things every week that need to get done, in ADDITION to everybody calling the helpdesk line and interrupting our work on the project.
As somebody who actually HAS perfect pitch, I think these things are awful. But then again, this isn't anything new in the music world; people have been altering pitch in the studio for years, even before "autotune". They just did it manually. This is just the next step.
Is it misrepresenting the abilities of the singer? Perhaps. I think people should just find musicians who have the looks AND the abilities.
An example, going back to the Civil Rights Movement analogy, would be a prominent African American pop-star taking on a progressively paler complexion to his skin over a few years (I won't name any names, but his initials are Michael Jackson).
Actually, in slight defense of MJ, his skin lightening has nothing to do with surgery or any voluntary act. Michael Jackson has a condition known as Vitiligo, which causes his skin to become progressively paler over the years as it loses its pigment. I ought to know, as I have the condition as well. As I get older, I'll get whiter and whiter until I have no real pigment left in my skin. It spreads from a patch or two to the whole body, and is extremely pronounced in black people (it's pretty pronounced in me because I'm mixed-racial, but I'm only 24 years old so it won't get really bad for several years). It's the reason Jackson wore a glove in the 80's.
Of course, this skin condition--also known as Leukoderma--has NOTHING to do with the fact that he now has no nose.
Not that I'm aware of. Finale is the de facto standard for notation, period. Anybody who's going to be doing music notation in a professional setting is going to be using that, so I think the likelihood of finding a program written for another OS is pretty low.
Engraving programs are INCREDIBLY complicated, so it seems to me that it's very unlikely you'd find it in the open source community because of the incredibly high complexity and low number of people who use software like that.
Even if this was a joke, you do have to realize how ridiculous that sounds, right? Just as you couldn't patent a guitar and then own every piece of music played by said guitar, you couldn't do it with this, either.
But then, I've always had a penchant for stating the absolutely obvious.
How, exactly, is information regarding how fast you were traveling an invasion of privacy? It's public information, not an invasion of privacy. I mean, the cops can find out how fast you were going by shooting you with a radar gun, and the ONLY time you'd have to worry about them checking it is if you were lying to them in the first place. Let's face it: this is hardly the Patriot Act of driving safety.
As has been said in this thread before, the only time those things are even useful are in the event of a crash. And then, finding out how fast the driver was going at the time of impact is VERY important.
I just fail to see how this is an invasion of somebody's privacy. It's not giving out any information about the driver, other than how fast he was driving. And that's hardly private information, since anybody can figure out how fast you were going by either using radar or pacing you on the highway.
Slashdot Mirror
As somebody who has perfect pitch, I completely agree with the statement that different keys have different colors to them. For example, when Bach wrote his "Magnificat" he did it for a church who hired him for the gig, but they wanted it in the key of E flat, which is a ridiculously boring key. After he was done with it, he changed it to the key of D Major, which is what he'd wanted to put it in in the first place. Makes a WORLD of difference.
Hell, I wish I'D kept my copy of Grout, rather than either selling it for beer or burying it somewhere. :)
There's more than once since graduation that I'd wanted to look up something about a composer or time period and realized that I can't remember if I sold my book or if I just lost track of it. I still wonder if I'll come across it down in my parents' basement or something, although I'm pretty sure it was got rid of for beer rather than saved for posterity.
Grout is the standard, though; that's for sure. I still remember my music theory teacher seeing it when I started taking Music History, and hearing him recite the entire first paragraph from memory from when he'd taken it years before... And that first paragraph still hadn't changed a bit since then.
And here I thought you were just using Engrish.
Something like a biopic of Mohammed Ali perhaps? ;)
Y'know, it's funny that you mentioned Ali, because I haven't seen it. It had completely slipped my mind; I had wanted to see it, but it just happened to be one of those films that slipped through the cracks for me.
Yeah, I should definitely see that.
Will Smith is an incredibly talented actor.
I couldn't agree more. Just because someone chooses to make drivel doesn't mean that they can't produce a real, down-to-earth piece of cinema. Take Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, for example. I knew that Jim Carrey could be a phenomenal dramatic actor from the first time I saw him in Ace Ventura. And he proved me right when he did The Majestic, which is one of my favorite movies of all time--despite its overly sappy plot and political beatings over the head. And Robin Williams, who for a long time got away with doing his normal schtick routine, has done a number of wonderful dramatic movies, one of which is--appropriately for this topic--Bicentennial Man. Good Will Hunting, Death to Smoochy (though that one wasn't so much dramatic), One Hour Photo, Awakenings, Dead Poets Society... the list goes on.
I would love to see Will Smith in another good dramatic role. As much as I liked Men In Black, I think he has a lot more potential than that.
Has the RIAA threatened to kill you or your familiy?
Try ousting them from their seats of power and see how quickly you might find out that they WILL do this.
It reminds me of a story a couple months back I saw about creating synthetic diamonds that were virtually identical to diamonds found in the earth, and on top of it were far cheaper. I remember remarking to my father at lunch one day that the person who had invented that technology had better watch his back, because he might find himself with a bullet in it if he wasn't wary of the diamon cartels.
The RIAA is just another cartel, and its actions are just as violent, if not in actuality then in principle. It will downright bury anything it doesn't want around, and we all know it can do it. They avoid being called a monopoly because they don't take a direct approach to media ownership, but in truth it's all a front and we know it.
Like any other unionized organization, it doesn't represent its members--it represents itself, and its number one interest isn't that of its members, but rather of the RIAA itself. The sooner we can get rid of that, the more likely it is that true capitalism will start working for the consumers and the sellers.
Idealistic, I know, but it IS possible.
I'd much rather have a more intelligent game design where I can see the monsters moving around the "map" or the "town", and if you touch one, the battle starts (like some RPGs).
Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest tried doing this and it was an abysmal failure. Of course, the game was horrible and way too easy, so that may have had something to do with it.
What I've played of Xenosaga uses this as well, though in a much better way: you can outrun a monster or outsmart it, but sometimes you have no choice but to fight them.
The biggest problem that I have with random encounters is what I'm running into now with Final Fantasy 9. The monsters are either way too easy and don't give you enough experience, or they're way too hard and you have to spend inordinate amounts of money to stock up on Potions to keep yourself alive; the battles take several minutes to complete and a level-up doesn't give you enough to keep up with the monsters. Leveling up takes hours, sometimes, and you MUST do it in order to keep up with the levels of the monsters you have to fight as you go through the game.
My solution is this, and has been used in a couple games in the past, though mostly in spell form, I believe. They should find a way to enable it so that you shouldn't have to fight monsters that are vastly weaker than you. These types of battles are just a waste of time and you shouldn't have to fight them unless you choose to. So here would be my suggestion:
If my level is 25, and I hit a random encounter, the game does a quick calculation of what type of monster I would be fighting. If the monster I would be fighting is of a level far lower than mine, then I don't hit the encounter. That way, I only fight monsters that are at my level or more powerful. However, rather than having the same number of battles, but this time with only high-level monsters (which makes it VERY tough to get to the next town so you can buy more Potions), the calculation would make sure that the number of battles would stay lower because the number of hypothetical battles stays the same, only those with the weak monsters don't happen. So this way, you fight less battles, but they're more difficult. It makes leveling up that much better because the battles you do fight are more meaningful and less tedious.
Did that make sense?
Actually, only New York has banned the practice. And even then, they only ban the use of handheld cellphones; if you have a hands-free device, it's perfectly legal.
However, it is important to note that studies have shown that there's no actual added safety when using a hands-free device as opposed to holding the cellphone in your hand. It's apparently the act of talking, rather than the holding the cellphone up to one's ear, that causes the real distraction from the road.
I don't know about anybody else, though, but when I'm talking on the phone in my car (hands-free or not), the phone conversation is usually what suffers, not my driving ability. Of course, my driving ability probably does go down and I just don't notice it, but I'm far more likely to miss what was said on the phone rather than take my eyes off the road or pay more attention with my ears.
I heard someone suggest that most of the "OS"es in movies are simply flash programs that are full screen, and will do the correct sequence of events, regardless of the input. Can anyone verify this?
:) The operating system they were running was actually Linux made to look like Mac OS 8/9, and they created a program that would take input from the keyboard and mouse and, no matter what was done, would make it do a set sequence of events.
I remember reading that in American Pie they did this with the whole webcam thing when they were watching Shannon Elizabeth take her clothes off.
Wow... I'm looking at this software, and while the demos on the website are beautiful, I can't make heads or tails out of this user interface.
I guess it would probably be easier if I were more familiar with the traditional 3D rendering programs, but I was never very good with 3DSMax, either.
they routinely work unpaid overtime
FLSA dictates that unpaid overtime is illegal. Unless they're exempt employees, they should be billing for that time.
There are always unforeseen circumstances that happen on the way to work. Just today, for example, I saw a woman on the side of the road whose car was on fire, or smoking, or something. I would have stopped, but two things occurred to me: (1) I was far enough away that backing up in the left breakdown lane scared the bejeezus out of me, and (2) I didn't want to be late for work.
Ironic, isn't it? My boss most certainly would have understood, especially because I was here until 12:15 last night working on a server. But I was actually worried about it.
I understand that being on time is an important asset, and I'm not saying that it's okay to just waltz into the building whenever you want. But if you're five minutes late because there was an accident on the highway, or you blew a flat tire, there's no reason they should be upset. And ESPECIALLY not if you were only one minute late. How many clocks in a company do you know are synchronized anyway? Who's to say that their clock isn't fast?
I don't know about you, but to me, YRO posts are the most important out of all tech stories. Privacy and speech are going to be the next huge battles fought in government, and it's going to be a big war, one that we'll all have to fight. I would hardly call any of the YRO posts "minor."
Yes, but even if they are monitoring "piracy" as they would inevitably claim, they are profiting from that. So, in a sense, they are profiting from piracy, which they have always denied in the first place. Because they can use the statistics of piracy to help sell more albums (which, ironically, goes against what they say about how piracy prevents sales in the first place--what was that? You sell more albums when you put the more popular stuff on sale? Look at that!), they'll have a difficult time trying to tell the courts that there is no legitimate use for file-swapping.
I hate to troll
:)
Aren't you actually "gnoming"?
You clearly don't know anyone living with a disability.
I'll give you an opportunity to take your foot out of your mouth. That was an incredibly not-thought-out statement.
Yes, of COURSE I've known people who live with disabilities. I grew up with them in school, worked with them directly, and have them in my family.
And you know what? I've never once met a disabled person who feels sorry for him- or herself to a point where they would make a big deal about HOW they were referred to. Most disabled persons would be glad enough that legislators even take the time out of their day to deal with them in the first place.
Calling them "disabled people" instead of "people with disabilities" is just more politically correct bullshit that doesn't do anything to change the real opinions of people. Saying "people with disabilities" no more makes people think of them in a different way than saying "person with homosexual preferences" instead of "gay person" would make somebody think differently of them.
I prefer to call a spade a spade and TREAT them as people rather than just pay them lip service that way.
Forgive my use of the colloquialism, given the fact that it was so apparent from the context of what I was saying that I was really inferring the fact that they could, indeed, care less.
Y'know, for people who have to overcome absurdly high hurdles and who generally come out unscatched, people sure make a big deal about their feelings. Most "people with disabilities" could care less what you called them.
It reminds me of how people make such a big deal about calling Indians "Native Americans" when, in fact, they're entirely wrong about why they're called "Indians" in the first place, and they seem to completely remove the opinions of the involved parties, who are perfectly fine with being called "Indians."
You forget that 80% of computer users (and 99% of elderly computer users) don't even know how to change the text size in their browser. Hell, a lot of them don't even know how to set their homepage.
So make it really easy for them and include a link on the page to change the font size larger or smaller. It's easy to do and it makes the choice very easy for them.
I'm a firm believer in taking a little extra time to make the viewer's job a little easier. It works in programming and it works in webpage coding as well.
I have coworkers on Slashdot? I thought I was the only one who was a member here... :)
Seriously, though, this describes my company to a tee. They just don't GET the fact that we can't spread ourselves too thin and work on fifty different projects at once--especially because we just got rid of an IT guy here. And yet there are still a hundred things every week that need to get done, in ADDITION to everybody calling the helpdesk line and interrupting our work on the project.
As somebody who actually HAS perfect pitch, I think these things are awful. But then again, this isn't anything new in the music world; people have been altering pitch in the studio for years, even before "autotune". They just did it manually. This is just the next step.
Is it misrepresenting the abilities of the singer? Perhaps. I think people should just find musicians who have the looks AND the abilities.
An example, going back to the Civil Rights Movement analogy, would be a prominent African American pop-star taking on a progressively paler complexion to his skin over a few years (I won't name any names, but his initials are Michael Jackson).
Actually, in slight defense of MJ, his skin lightening has nothing to do with surgery or any voluntary act. Michael Jackson has a condition known as Vitiligo, which causes his skin to become progressively paler over the years as it loses its pigment. I ought to know, as I have the condition as well. As I get older, I'll get whiter and whiter until I have no real pigment left in my skin. It spreads from a patch or two to the whole body, and is extremely pronounced in black people (it's pretty pronounced in me because I'm mixed-racial, but I'm only 24 years old so it won't get really bad for several years). It's the reason Jackson wore a glove in the 80's.
Of course, this skin condition--also known as Leukoderma--has NOTHING to do with the fact that he now has no nose.
Die.
Not that I'm aware of. Finale is the de facto standard for notation, period. Anybody who's going to be doing music notation in a professional setting is going to be using that, so I think the likelihood of finding a program written for another OS is pretty low.
Engraving programs are INCREDIBLY complicated, so it seems to me that it's very unlikely you'd find it in the open source community because of the incredibly high complexity and low number of people who use software like that.
Even if this was a joke, you do have to realize how ridiculous that sounds, right? Just as you couldn't patent a guitar and then own every piece of music played by said guitar, you couldn't do it with this, either.
But then, I've always had a penchant for stating the absolutely obvious.
How, exactly, is information regarding how fast you were traveling an invasion of privacy? It's public information, not an invasion of privacy. I mean, the cops can find out how fast you were going by shooting you with a radar gun, and the ONLY time you'd have to worry about them checking it is if you were lying to them in the first place. Let's face it: this is hardly the Patriot Act of driving safety.
As has been said in this thread before, the only time those things are even useful are in the event of a crash. And then, finding out how fast the driver was going at the time of impact is VERY important.
I just fail to see how this is an invasion of somebody's privacy. It's not giving out any information about the driver, other than how fast he was driving. And that's hardly private information, since anybody can figure out how fast you were going by either using radar or pacing you on the highway.