Doesn't Michael Jackson (yep, Janet's brother) own the rights to the Beatles' back catalogue? In fact, I'm pretty sure I read that it and Neverland are basically his only financial assets these days; everything else he "owns" is leveraged against one or the other.
Anyone know if that means he's now getting the copyright income from albums such as the White Album?
I agree that pre-recorded music doesn't sound as good as live, but I also suspect that many people couldn't tell the difference and many others would actually disagree - people in Western countries hear computerised music all the time now and many think the human factor aka "mistakes" is actually undesirable.
However, in this case it's a mix of live music and "recorded" music that's still under the control of a human. I'd guess that the "less emotive" (for want of another term) parts have been delegated to the synth guy.
>...basically you end up with a much inferior > performance. But since people don't actually know > what a stage show should look like these days > anyway, nobody misses anything
That's exactly the point - the people paying at the gate don't think they're missing anything. If they don't, then the decision to use synths is the right one as it cuts costs and may make the difference between being able to deliver the production or not.
In this case, (and leaving aside the logistics of not being able to fit a large enough orchestra in the pit) there is a human controlling the synths, and presumably he/she has some level of interaction with the machines that can be at the command of the conductor. That would seem to be more than adequate, given the lack of attention we both agree the audience will pay to the music.
If I lived in that part of the world, I'd actually go out of my way to see the show to see how it works out.
I'd be very surprised if she hasn't been using a pitch-filter on just about everything she's recorded.
That type of music sounds particularly (ok, "even more") grating when the singer is out of tune. When every instrument in the mix is absolutely mechanically perfect, off-key vocals stand out like dog's balls.
Pop music producers have been tweaking singer's pitch since at least the Stock Aitken Waterman days in the mid 80s, and it's that difficult to detect now that they'd be silly not to use it.
If there were more people like you around, Britney wouldn't stand a chance. In fact, you're probably already depriving her of income she's entitled to by not buying her music.
That's it buddy - I'm calling the RIAA!
The simple fact is - most people would rather hear music played "perfectly" and look at the pretty pictures, than listen to the mistakes that real musos make.
As I said, people go to the theatre to see the actors or to view the story or to see what the director has done with the story, not to listen to the musicians (in the vast majority of cases).
I think, more than anything else, the salary of an orchestral musician reflects the fact that they're generally (a) highly replaceable, and (b) not a key component of the overall package. I'm not saying they're not highly skilled, but there's an awful lot of unemployed musicians out there prepared to work for peanuts.
Exceptions obviously exist, but how often would people fork out cash to go to a play or musical because a particular musician is involved?
Unless someone's done something interesting with arrangements, the musicians playing the score for Les Mis have very little to no creative input in the music they're producing. They play what's on the score, and there's very little interaction between the cast and orchestra in a typical concert hall.
The fact that large chunks of this production of Les Mis can be played by synths tends to suggest that either the arrangements are either very straightforward or that they're particularly avant garde (i.e. it might actually be tough to find/afford musicians who can do them justice). The simple fact is (and I've been a muso in a past life so I'm gonna get beaten up if any of several people read this!) that the synths are probably *better* able to deliver the musical background that the director wants to achieve. They don't make mistakes, they don't break up with their partners just before the show, and they won't get better offers elsewhere.
Bottom line: people don't go to Les Mis to hear the orchestra play, and probably very few of them know or care whether "real" musicians are playing. They go because they think it's a good story and/or to see specific actors and/or because the director may have done something interesting with it.
> Fact #2: Use Linux as a Windows user, i.e. logged > as root all the time, installing and disinstalling > crap, not knowing what the hell you're doing, and > I guarantee you Linux is less secure than Windows.
You would be correct, but the real issue is that Linux users (excepting Lindows users) *don't* normally run as root. They also typically install software from relatively trusted sources such as Mandrake, RedHat or Debian; instead of going to something like Kazaa and contracting all sorts of ugly diseases in the process, they download e.g. limewire from a site that isn't operated by people with commercial agendas that are at odds with your own personal agendas.
The very fact that this is the way Windows, and Windows users, work is a large part of what causes it to break. You can't sensibly argue "if only Linux worked like Windows, then it would be as bad as Windows".
Now that the MS source for NT 4 and Win2k is "out there", even if only in part, we'll have a good chance to see exactly how secure it is over the next several months.
Anyone want to bet that the number of exploited Windows security holes is NOT gonna soar?
I'm now regularly "reviving" old Windows desktop boxes that didn't have enough grunt to run as Win XP systems. They still make perfectly useable Linux systems.
The majority of these are used as firewalls or Samba servers, but some are running Mepis. There's nothing like taking a "junk" PC from someone, then "reviving" it for use as a Web browser/email/simple office PC. Many, many home users are upgrading their old PCs, and I suspect a growing number of these are now retaining their old PCs and redeploying them as simple Linux SOHO desktops.
After all, a ~500MHz, 128Mb RAM desktop PC is barely useful for Windows 2k or XP, but still works fine as a Linux desktop.
I doubt that these PCs are showing up as Linux PCs on any survey - they usually were originally sold with a Windows licence. As they're often "second" PCs, they might rarely get used for Internet access; instead Mum or Dad use them for work stuff while the kids are playing games on the shiny new PC.
Given the relative market shares, maybe Apple is going to devote those resources to integrating with Linux instead. Didn't the Linux (desktop) user base slip past the Apple (desktop) user base last year?
> and what's this bit about the MPAA having > BitTorrent on their radar screen???
Seems obvious to me...
If you were the MPAA, wouldn't you be very interested in sites that had the following characteristics? - lots of people downloading your copyrighted stuff - site itself is easily traceable to an owner - each user of the site is easily identifiable to at least an IP address level - many site users will have static IP addresses, making tracing them fairly trivial even without the cooperation of their ISPs
The MPAA won't go after BitTorrent itself; just these sites and their easily tracked users.
I think many people here are taking an exceptionally negative view of what BitTorrent is. You're not all from the RIAA, are you?;-> ("We're from the RIAA. We're here to help")
There's many valid reasons why a lot of users might want to download big files simultaneously. Linux ISOs, Windows service packs, software distribution in general are just three that come to mind straight away. I'm sure Mandrake, RedHat, Knopper, SuSE, and even MS would be very glad they can (potentially) reduce their bandwidth costs by making a BitTorrent download available.
As far as the potential of being used for "bad things" goes - well, I don't exactly put Bram Cohen in the same class as Smith & Wesson, or even the manufacturers of plastic forks. It's obvious to me that illegal download sites using BitTorrent were going to spring up, and equally obvious that both these sites and their users would be easily trackable via their IP addresses at the very least.
I'm gonna have a quiet chuckle to myself if/when people using these sites start getting prosecured, since they obviously didn't think through the ramifications before they started using the service - I'd call it a Darwinian selection process in action.
I don't think the US govt has any driving need to change things at the USPTO. With patents becoming an increasingly important potential revenue sources for the US, changes need to take place on a wider basis.
After all, if IBM/MS/Eolas/... gets granted a patent, that potentially is a way for drawing revenue into the US via licence payments from non-US companies. Quite frankly, the US govt must be drooling at the potential income in this area as countries such as India and China race headlong into technology.
Suppose the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) stepped in and said "We no longer recognise US patents as applying worldwide. We regard the USPTO as an incompetent organisation, and thus we're giving the US govt 1 year to fix the problem. After that time, we'll send in an independent team of reviewers and they can assess whether the USPTO has become competent to grant what are effectively worldwide patents."
"If we find the USPTO is still incompetent at that time, all USPTO-granted patents will only apply within the US. The rest of the world is free to ignore them. End of story"
My current 3M pixel camera gets approx 160 pictures onto a 256Mb flash card; that's with minimal compression of the JPG files. Doing a bit of maths, that means approx 5000 pictures per 8Gb flash card - a bit much to be carrying around with me!
Looking at an extreme case: assume a pro photographer has a 12M pixel camera, and takes only TIFF files. That would get approx 750 pictures (I think; it's pretty late here!) on a 8Gb card. That's a hell of a lot of pictures to be carrying around with you, and a lot you're risking if the card dies or your camera gets stolen. I just can't believe that someone would need that capacity; surely they'd backup to some other, more sturdy media well before they got that quantity of pictures.
IIRC, high-quality digital video would produce data faster than these these cards can store it. DV would conceivably merit the capacity, but the media would be too slow.
Is there any other likely reasonably widespread use for these enormous flash cards? Something I've missed?
Common sense says that the underlying problem is that a trademark on "Windows" should never have been awarded to Microsoft in the first place. Lots of stupidity can be traced back to that decision.
It's not like the term "Windows" didn't have a generic use prior to it being turned into a trademark, nor can anyone sensibly claim that Microsoft was the first to use "windows" as a description for a way of displaying multiple applications on a computer screen simultaneously. Xerox PARC was using the term, and had a demonstrable windowing system, several years prior to MS first applying for the trademark.
As an aside, it's always struck me as strange that MS successfully patented "Windows", but no-one patented "mouse".
A sensible legal system would throw out the original "Windows" trademark as being invalid.
George, why don't you go yourself? You'll get the chance to explore Mars yourself - what greater mark can a man make on the human species than to be the first to set foot on anotehr planet? Right after Neil Armstrong in the history books, kids will find George Dubya.
Now, as for your first travelling companion. Look, we know you two guys haven't gotten on well in the past, but we think Saddam and you've got a lot of common attributes. In the right setting, we think you could achieve wonders together.
We reckon there's gonna be oil on Mars. Now, to make things easier for you, here's a map of where to start looking. Saddam's gonna start on one side of Mars, and you can start on the other. Whoever gets the most oil, wins. Yep, just like here on Earth.
All those other guys? Oh, they're the management consultants and hairdressers. We know you're gonna need a lot of them around.
Bye now. Y'all have a nice trip
What's that? Oh sure, we've packed enough fuel so you can get back, don't worry about that...
You're right that configuring servers is achievable from Knoppix; it's just that you wind up with a machine full of unwanted stuff (e.g. OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc.) that you don't want lying around on a server.
You need some sort of script to remove that stuff, but there's (from memory) about 1000 packages that get written to disc when you install Knoppix from a CD, and it seems a bit silly to install that many then delete 90% of them. The risks of screwing up somewhere would be too high.
Responding to my own earlier suggestion, maybe a better overall approach would be to install an absolute bare-bones system via a "Knoppix server" CD, then have scripts on that CD to add a whole bunch of server packages from that same CD. You'd want both a GUI and a "scriptable via USB key" way of selecting which packages to install, followed by "Do you wish to download and install security updates?" at the very end of the process.
That's why I'm suggesting disabling the servers if you've booted from hard disc. Disabling the servers means exploits won't be effective.
Debian seems to have the best mechanism for distributing security updates; it's free (both of cost and painful licencing conditions), simple and appears to work very well.
Maybe there should be a step in there "Do you wish to download the latest security updates?" at install time.
Not true. There's more than one way to contribute.
I'm happy to pay for these distros unless/until I've got time to contribute to their creation. Provided my parents like it, Mepis will be getting some funds from me after I install it for them this weekend to replace their continually broken Windows system. A few dollars out of my pocket is well worth it to give them a system that works for more than a few weeks without encountering new problems.
I'll also happily test these distros on server-class systems and give feedback as appropriate, from the background of someone who's been working in the industry for >20 years and who knows how corporate IT systems need to work.
I'd be *much* happier learning how to build one of these distros myself, but there isn't enough time in the day to do so at present. Funny how having kids will do that to you.
All around the world, last night men were saying "Where's the box of f'rubbers gone?". According to the box, they feel just like natural skin as well....Or so I've heard. Sigh
I've been in that same situation too - it was at a bank where they said they "couldn't" create anonymous data so all development and testing was done using copies of live production data. Yep, that includes personal and corporate account data. My response was to send email to the CIO, close my accounts at that bank and inform all my friends.
While I was there, and in spite of dire warnings, it became common practice for contractors to copy "stuff" onto their laptops from the systems we were working on, take it home and read through it. I assume they were only taking home code and/or documentation, but I didn't really want to know.
There is *no* excuse for supplying sensitive data to contractors. As you point out, it may be non-trivial to anonymize data in some cases, but it has to be done to preserve the integrity of the relationship with your customers.
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Doesn't Michael Jackson (yep, Janet's brother) own the rights to the Beatles' back catalogue? In fact, I'm pretty sure I read that it and Neverland are basically his only financial assets these days; everything else he "owns" is leveraged against one or the other.
Anyone know if that means he's now getting the copyright income from albums such as the White Album?
I agree that pre-recorded music doesn't sound as good as live, but I also suspect that many people couldn't tell the difference and many others would actually disagree - people in Western countries hear computerised music all the time now and many think the human factor aka "mistakes" is actually undesirable.
However, in this case it's a mix of live music and "recorded" music that's still under the control of a human. I'd guess that the "less emotive" (for want of another term) parts have been delegated to the synth guy.
> ...basically you end up with a much inferior
> performance. But since people don't actually know
> what a stage show should look like these days
> anyway, nobody misses anything
That's exactly the point - the people paying at the gate don't think they're missing anything. If they don't, then the decision to use synths is the right one as it cuts costs and may make the difference between being able to deliver the production or not.
In this case, (and leaving aside the logistics of not being able to fit a large enough orchestra in the pit) there is a human controlling the synths, and presumably he/she has some level of interaction with the machines that can be at the command of the conductor. That would seem to be more than adequate, given the lack of attention we both agree the audience will pay to the music.
If I lived in that part of the world, I'd actually go out of my way to see the show to see how it works out.
I'd be very surprised if she hasn't been using a pitch-filter on just about everything she's recorded.
That type of music sounds particularly (ok, "even more") grating when the singer is out of tune. When every instrument in the mix is absolutely mechanically perfect, off-key vocals stand out like dog's balls.
Pop music producers have been tweaking singer's pitch since at least the Stock Aitken Waterman days in the mid 80s, and it's that difficult to detect now that they'd be silly not to use it.
If there were more people like you around, Britney wouldn't stand a chance. In fact, you're probably already depriving her of income she's entitled to by not buying her music.
That's it buddy - I'm calling the RIAA!
The simple fact is - most people would rather hear music played "perfectly" and look at the pretty pictures, than listen to the mistakes that real musos make.
As I said, people go to the theatre to see the actors or to view the story or to see what the director has done with the story, not to listen to the musicians (in the vast majority of cases).
I think, more than anything else, the salary of an orchestral musician reflects the fact that they're generally (a) highly replaceable, and (b) not a key component of the overall package. I'm not saying they're not highly skilled, but there's an awful lot of unemployed musicians out there prepared to work for peanuts.
Exceptions obviously exist, but how often would people fork out cash to go to a play or musical because a particular musician is involved?
At a guess, a large consideration in this decision was to reduce the cost of "delivering" the music.
If so, maybe this was the only way they could afford to stage the show at all.
Here goes the karma...
Unless someone's done something interesting with arrangements, the musicians playing the score for Les Mis have very little to no creative input in the music they're producing. They play what's on the score, and there's very little interaction between the cast and orchestra in a typical concert hall.
The fact that large chunks of this production of Les Mis can be played by synths tends to suggest that either the arrangements are either very straightforward or that they're particularly avant garde (i.e. it might actually be tough to find/afford musicians who can do them justice). The simple fact is (and I've been a muso in a past life so I'm gonna get beaten up if any of several people read this!) that the synths are probably *better* able to deliver the musical background that the director wants to achieve. They don't make mistakes, they don't break up with their partners just before the show, and they won't get better offers elsewhere.
Bottom line: people don't go to Les Mis to hear the orchestra play, and probably very few of them know or care whether "real" musicians are playing. They go because they think it's a good story and/or to see specific actors and/or because the director may have done something interesting with it.
I agree with your points except for this:
> Fact #2: Use Linux as a Windows user, i.e. logged
> as root all the time, installing and disinstalling
> crap, not knowing what the hell you're doing, and
> I guarantee you Linux is less secure than Windows.
You would be correct, but the real issue is that Linux users (excepting Lindows users) *don't* normally run as root. They also typically install software from relatively trusted sources such as Mandrake, RedHat or Debian; instead of going to something like Kazaa and contracting all sorts of ugly diseases in the process, they download e.g. limewire from a site that isn't operated by people with commercial agendas that are at odds with your own personal agendas.
The very fact that this is the way Windows, and Windows users, work is a large part of what causes it to break. You can't sensibly argue "if only Linux worked like Windows, then it would be as bad as Windows".
Now that the MS source for NT 4 and Win2k is "out there", even if only in part, we'll have a good chance to see exactly how secure it is over the next several months.
Anyone want to bet that the number of exploited Windows security holes is NOT gonna soar?
I'm now regularly "reviving" old Windows desktop boxes that didn't have enough grunt to run as Win XP systems. They still make perfectly useable Linux systems.
The majority of these are used as firewalls or Samba servers, but some are running Mepis. There's nothing like taking a "junk" PC from someone, then "reviving" it for use as a Web browser/email/simple office PC. Many, many home users are upgrading their old PCs, and I suspect a growing number of these are now retaining their old PCs and redeploying them as simple Linux SOHO desktops.
After all, a ~500MHz, 128Mb RAM desktop PC is barely useful for Windows 2k or XP, but still works fine as a Linux desktop.
I doubt that these PCs are showing up as Linux PCs on any survey - they usually were originally sold with a Windows licence. As they're often "second" PCs, they might rarely get used for Internet access; instead Mum or Dad use them for work stuff while the kids are playing games on the shiny new PC.
Given the relative market shares, maybe Apple is going to devote those resources to integrating with Linux instead. Didn't the Linux (desktop) user base slip past the Apple (desktop) user base last year?
> and what's this bit about the MPAA having
> BitTorrent on their radar screen???
Seems obvious to me...
If you were the MPAA, wouldn't you be very interested in sites that had the following characteristics?
- lots of people downloading your copyrighted stuff
- site itself is easily traceable to an owner
- each user of the site is easily identifiable to at least an IP address level
- many site users will have static IP addresses, making tracing them fairly trivial even without the cooperation of their ISPs
The MPAA won't go after BitTorrent itself; just these sites and their easily tracked users.
I think many people here are taking an exceptionally negative view of what BitTorrent is. You're not all from the RIAA, are you? ;-> ("We're from the RIAA. We're here to help")
There's many valid reasons why a lot of users might want to download big files simultaneously. Linux ISOs, Windows service packs, software distribution in general are just three that come to mind straight away. I'm sure Mandrake, RedHat, Knopper, SuSE, and even MS would be very glad they can (potentially) reduce their bandwidth costs by making a BitTorrent download available.
As far as the potential of being used for "bad things" goes - well, I don't exactly put Bram Cohen in the same class as Smith & Wesson, or even the manufacturers of plastic forks. It's obvious to me that illegal download sites using BitTorrent were going to spring up, and equally obvious that both these sites and their users would be easily trackable via their IP addresses at the very least.
I'm gonna have a quiet chuckle to myself if/when people using these sites start getting prosecured, since they obviously didn't think through the ramifications before they started using the service - I'd call it a Darwinian selection process in action.
I don't think the US govt has any driving need to change things at the USPTO. With patents becoming an increasingly important potential revenue sources for the US, changes need to take place on a wider basis.
After all, if IBM/MS/Eolas/... gets granted a patent, that potentially is a way for drawing revenue into the US via licence payments from non-US companies. Quite frankly, the US govt must be drooling at the potential income in this area as countries such as India and China race headlong into technology.
Suppose the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) stepped in and said "We no longer recognise US patents as applying worldwide. We regard the USPTO as an incompetent organisation, and thus we're giving the US govt 1 year to fix the problem. After that time, we'll send in an independent team of reviewers and they can assess whether the USPTO has become competent to grant what are effectively worldwide patents."
"If we find the USPTO is still incompetent at that time, all USPTO-granted patents will only apply within the US. The rest of the world is free to ignore them. End of story"
*That* would get the US govt jumping.
My current 3M pixel camera gets approx 160 pictures onto a 256Mb flash card; that's with minimal compression of the JPG files. Doing a bit of maths, that means approx 5000 pictures per 8Gb flash card - a bit much to be carrying around with me!
Looking at an extreme case: assume a pro photographer has a 12M pixel camera, and takes only TIFF files. That would get approx 750 pictures (I think; it's pretty late here!) on a 8Gb card. That's a hell of a lot of pictures to be carrying around with you, and a lot you're risking if the card dies or your camera gets stolen. I just can't believe that someone would need that capacity; surely they'd backup to some other, more sturdy media well before they got that quantity of pictures.
IIRC, high-quality digital video would produce data faster than these these cards can store it. DV would conceivably merit the capacity, but the media would be too slow.
Is there any other likely reasonably widespread use for these enormous flash cards? Something I've missed?
Common sense says that the underlying problem is that a trademark on "Windows" should never have been awarded to Microsoft in the first place. Lots of stupidity can be traced back to that decision.
It's not like the term "Windows" didn't have a generic use prior to it being turned into a trademark, nor can anyone sensibly claim that Microsoft was the first to use "windows" as a description for a way of displaying multiple applications on a computer screen simultaneously. Xerox PARC was using the term, and had a demonstrable windowing system, several years prior to MS first applying for the trademark.
As an aside, it's always struck me as strange that MS successfully patented "Windows", but no-one patented "mouse".
A sensible legal system would throw out the original "Windows" trademark as being invalid.
You'd almost think this was an election year
George, why don't you go yourself? You'll get the chance to explore Mars yourself - what greater mark can a man make on the human species than to be the first to set foot on anotehr planet? Right after Neil Armstrong in the history books, kids will find George Dubya.
Now, as for your first travelling companion. Look, we know you two guys haven't gotten on well in the past, but we think Saddam and you've got a lot of common attributes. In the right setting, we think you could achieve wonders together.
We reckon there's gonna be oil on Mars. Now, to make things easier for you, here's a map of where to start looking. Saddam's gonna start on one side of Mars, and you can start on the other. Whoever gets the most oil, wins. Yep, just like here on Earth.
All those other guys? Oh, they're the management consultants and hairdressers. We know you're gonna need a lot of them around.
Bye now. Y'all have a nice trip
What's that? Oh sure, we've packed enough fuel so you can get back, don't worry about that...
You're right that configuring servers is achievable from Knoppix; it's just that you wind up with a machine full of unwanted stuff (e.g. OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc.) that you don't want lying around on a server.
You need some sort of script to remove that stuff, but there's (from memory) about 1000 packages that get written to disc when you install Knoppix from a CD, and it seems a bit silly to install that many then delete 90% of them. The risks of screwing up somewhere would be too high.
Responding to my own earlier suggestion, maybe a better overall approach would be to install an absolute bare-bones system via a "Knoppix server" CD, then have scripts on that CD to add a whole bunch of server packages from that same CD. You'd want both a GUI and a "scriptable via USB key" way of selecting which packages to install, followed by "Do you wish to download and install security updates?" at the very end of the process.
That's why I'm suggesting disabling the servers if you've booted from hard disc. Disabling the servers means exploits won't be effective.
Debian seems to have the best mechanism for distributing security updates; it's free (both of cost and painful licencing conditions), simple and appears to work very well.
Maybe there should be a step in there "Do you wish to download the latest security updates?" at install time.
Not true. There's more than one way to contribute.
I'm happy to pay for these distros unless/until I've got time to contribute to their creation. Provided my parents like it, Mepis will be getting some funds from me after I install it for them this weekend to replace their continually broken Windows system. A few dollars out of my pocket is well worth it to give them a system that works for more than a few weeks without encountering new problems.
I'll also happily test these distros on server-class systems and give feedback as appropriate, from the background of someone who's been working in the industry for >20 years and who knows how corporate IT systems need to work.
I'd be *much* happier learning how to build one of these distros myself, but there isn't enough time in the day to do so at present. Funny how having kids will do that to you.
All around the world, last night men were saying "Where's the box of f'rubbers gone?". According to the box, they feel just like natural skin as well. ...Or so I've heard. Sigh
I've been in that same situation too - it was at a bank where they said they "couldn't" create anonymous data so all development and testing was done using copies of live production data. Yep, that includes personal and corporate account data. My response was to send email to the CIO, close my accounts at that bank and inform all my friends.
While I was there, and in spite of dire warnings, it became common practice for contractors to copy "stuff" onto their laptops from the systems we were working on, take it home and read through it. I assume they were only taking home code and/or documentation, but I didn't really want to know.
There is *no* excuse for supplying sensitive data to contractors. As you point out, it may be non-trivial to anonymize data in some cases, but it has to be done to preserve the integrity of the relationship with your customers.