Everyone likes to think that the Music Industry is stupid. They're just resistant to change. They've been milking the Album/CD cow for decades now. The 70s really made it work well with concept albums. But what they really wanted to do was to get you buying albums so that they could charge you album price for that one song you liked on the radio. Now that model is evaporating. So they want to strong-arm Apple into letting them charge more for the pop singles, so that they will be near the price of an album (what they really want is for it to be the same price as an album).
I started out downloading illegally with Napster, but I bought a lot of CDs too. But when Apple came out with iTS, I eagerly awaited for it to be available in Sweden. First I only bought when I had money and still downloaded illegally. But after two years, now I only buy from iTS and on-line CD stores. I don't want to hunt and wait for some crap encoded file on P2P. I'm even thinking about deleting all those files from my HDs. iTS and CDs are best way to get music.
However, I'm nearly 40 and am not of the P2P generation that thinks everything should be available for free. I enjoy paying for entertainment. I also only buy classical, jazz, folk and bluegrass music. Pop is utter crap, and rock has lost its appeal for me.
Lilypond is great for making sheet music of existing music (fast, easy and beautiful). However, it is harder for many (not all) composers to composer without seeing staff paper. The best for you would be to sit at the piano with some blank staff paper. Write by hand. Then transfer the written music into Lilypond.
Lilypond beats the snot out of Sibelius and Finale. It produces the most beautiful music with the default typeset of any other program. Copy and paste work too. However, you have to learn to code a little.
The ones I make look beautiful. Nothing wrong with the fonts. Of course I use pdfLaTeX to create the PDFs directly, instead of LaTeX - dvi - ps - pdf. You can type \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} to fix things if you don't use pdfLaTeX.
Some people consider having less computer hassles (things "just work" out of the box) and lower IT employment costs a better investment than cut-rate PC with higher hassles per seat and higher IT employment costs.
I love MacFUSE and sshfs for using my webpage provider as a cheaper, faster, and better alternative to iDisk.
No more syncing files from work and home. I just edit the file directly on the server.
I mount it on my Ubuntu box at work. The old iMac G3 at work needs to be upgraded to Tiger before I can use it. Grr.
I'm an American teaching English at a Swedish high school (www.rockgymnasiet.se). I have to admit that many of our students are very lazy. I can easily see that they have not done much homework or work in elementary school (junior high is considered part of elementary school here; bit part of secondary education). So on the rare occasions that I have given homework, most students fail to do it. Deadline are almost useless also.
The new government is thinking about requiring more homework and setting grades for younger students.
I'm a high school teacher in Sweden, and some of the other teachers and I were just talking about this yesterday. Many of our students (mostly male) spend many hours playing video games. They all tend to have little imagination. Ask them to write a story, a poem, and even a movie review, and they'll just stare at a white Word document for the entire lesson (doesn't help if they go low-tech and use pencil and paper either).
One teacher was remembering his electric train set and another his Matchbox car collection as ways for kids to use their imaginations. Instead of letting them atrophy (and atrophy they will if they are not stimulated). For me it was sports, plastic dinosaurs, cars, baseball cards, books and games.
My own kids (almost 6 and 3, the 3 month old doesn't play so much yet) have many more toys and books than I did.
I'm a teacher and professional writer. I write everything (except textbook manuscripts that publishers ask me to write in collaboration with other authors) in LaTeX. I never use Lyx. TexShop all the way, baby.
That's why I (a humanities person) switched. Word's footnote and column frustrations drove me crazy. LaTeX with Koma-script and Ledmac produce beautiful documents.
I used LaTeX and Koma-Script to produce an anthology of my students' English stories and poems and the Swedish teacher's students' works. It turned out great.
Took all day on Friday (still wasn't finished when I left for the weekend (long 4-day weekend too!). Of course my computer at work is just a PIII 700 or 800 MHz with 256 MB RAM.
Especially the generation that has grown up with P2P. Some of my high school students wouldn't dream of paying for a DVD, CD or video game.
Everyone likes to think that the Music Industry is stupid. They're just resistant to change. They've been milking the Album/CD cow for decades now. The 70s really made it work well with concept albums. But what they really wanted to do was to get you buying albums so that they could charge you album price for that one song you liked on the radio. Now that model is evaporating. So they want to strong-arm Apple into letting them charge more for the pop singles, so that they will be near the price of an album (what they really want is for it to be the same price as an album).
Type ".99 pounds in USD" in your Google search bar.
I started out downloading illegally with Napster, but I bought a lot of CDs too. But when Apple came out with iTS, I eagerly awaited for it to be available in Sweden. First I only bought when I had money and still downloaded illegally. But after two years, now I only buy from iTS and on-line CD stores. I don't want to hunt and wait for some crap encoded file on P2P. I'm even thinking about deleting all those files from my HDs. iTS and CDs are best way to get music.
However, I'm nearly 40 and am not of the P2P generation that thinks everything should be available for free. I enjoy paying for entertainment. I also only buy classical, jazz, folk and bluegrass music. Pop is utter crap, and rock has lost its appeal for me.
Lilypond is great for making sheet music of existing music (fast, easy and beautiful). However, it is harder for many (not all) composers to composer without seeing staff paper. The best for you would be to sit at the piano with some blank staff paper. Write by hand. Then transfer the written music into Lilypond.
Chess, Arkham Horror (with all expansions), Munchkin Cthulhu, or Illuminati would all be better than any computer game.
Lilypond beats the snot out of Sibelius and Finale. It produces the most beautiful music with the default typeset of any other program. Copy and paste work too. However, you have to learn to code a little.
The ones I make look beautiful. Nothing wrong with the fonts. Of course I use pdfLaTeX to create the PDFs directly, instead of LaTeX - dvi - ps - pdf. You can type \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} to fix things if you don't use pdfLaTeX.
Some people consider having less computer hassles (things "just work" out of the box) and lower IT employment costs a better investment than cut-rate PC with higher hassles per seat and higher IT employment costs.
I love MacFUSE and sshfs for using my webpage provider as a cheaper, faster, and better alternative to iDisk. No more syncing files from work and home. I just edit the file directly on the server. I mount it on my Ubuntu box at work. The old iMac G3 at work needs to be upgraded to Tiger before I can use it. Grr.
I'm an American teaching English at a Swedish high school (www.rockgymnasiet.se). I have to admit that many of our students are very lazy. I can easily see that they have not done much homework or work in elementary school (junior high is considered part of elementary school here; bit part of secondary education). So on the rare occasions that I have given homework, most students fail to do it. Deadline are almost useless also. The new government is thinking about requiring more homework and setting grades for younger students.
I'm a high school teacher in Sweden, and some of the other teachers and I were just talking about this yesterday. Many of our students (mostly male) spend many hours playing video games. They all tend to have little imagination. Ask them to write a story, a poem, and even a movie review, and they'll just stare at a white Word document for the entire lesson (doesn't help if they go low-tech and use pencil and paper either). One teacher was remembering his electric train set and another his Matchbox car collection as ways for kids to use their imaginations. Instead of letting them atrophy (and atrophy they will if they are not stimulated). For me it was sports, plastic dinosaurs, cars, baseball cards, books and games. My own kids (almost 6 and 3, the 3 month old doesn't play so much yet) have many more toys and books than I did.
Tell said Exec. to shell out 99 for .Mac.
Don't her peers already snicker at her because she's a photo pro who doesn't use a Mac?
It can read PDFs. I usually LaTeXify Project Gutenberg books to make beautifully typeset texts.
Imagine a Project Gutenburg DVD loaded on one of these.
That's a great idea, except the loaner should be a Mac. ;-)
TextEdit and InDesign? Puh, I use TexShop and LaTeX for all my documents (unless a publisher requires Word for collaboration). ;-)
They were talking about MUSIC (and music theory) not pop crap.
I'm a teacher and professional writer. I write everything (except textbook manuscripts that publishers ask me to write in collaboration with other authors) in LaTeX. I never use Lyx. TexShop all the way, baby.
That's why I (a humanities person) switched. Word's footnote and column frustrations drove me crazy. LaTeX with Koma-script and Ledmac produce beautiful documents.
Hand in paper versions for editing. Or ask them to use % to make comments of the editing.
See for yourself --- It's Only Rock 'n' Roll but I Like It. I am thinking of starting my own publishing house here in Sweden using Books On Demand's service.
They are waiting to "officially" announce the release when the packages are ready. You can download the tarball now, however.
Took all day on Friday (still wasn't finished when I left for the weekend (long 4-day weekend too!). Of course my computer at work is just a PIII 700 or 800 MHz with 256 MB RAM.