Even 'Plastic Guitar' is a stretch. Its not a plastic guitar. It is not by any stretch a musical instrument. Its an input device programed for a specific game. A real musical instrument can be played with any piece of music. Could you use the 'guitar' from guitar hero to play along with Kristy Lee Cook while she plays a country version of 'Eight Days a Week' on American Idol? Or use it play along with any song someone picks out of the blue? If not, its not a musical instrument.
I wonder what would happen to someone who worked at Microsoft and wore that shirt. Get fired, probably. At least that's how companies react to such things in my experience.
Our solar system: Large gas planets farther out, small rocky planets close to the star.
Most star systems discovered so far: Large gas planets close in to the star with no room for small rocky planets in the habitable zone.
It would still be possible to have habitable moons orbiting gas giants in the habitable zone. Titan and Ganymede are both moons the size of small planet, and Titan has an atmosphere. Europa is covered in ice. Though a moon in the habital zone would have to be closer to Earth size to retain a significant atmosphere, e.g. Mars has only a very thin atmosphere.
why is it so disrespectful to show a picture of Muhammad? and if pictures are so bad why do they not ban cameras outright?
And, taking that further, since they think images of people are wrong, they should ban TV.
Muslims are still stuck in the dark ages. The Christian Churches were pretty intolerant and brutal against non-believers five or six hundred years ago. Much like today's Muslims.
there is the another side of the coin. Does a small group of mega corporations have the right to hog significant chunks of the nation's bandwidth for their own personal profit, at no cost to them. The worst offender would be downloading and streaming movies. How about in the future when HD movies take off, and we're all downloading and streaming HD movies to watch on our 65" flat screen HD TVs. That would eat up huge amounts of bandwidth. Do we want to subsidize the oligarchy of Hollywood movie studios and their distributors?
What you say is very true. Unfortunately proactive work, which can save companies thousands or even millions, or even save companies, is seldom appreciated by clueless bosses.
And this is the problem with most DRM schemes. They do nothing to solve the real problems of pirated media, and instead put all kinds of shackles on the people who actually pay good money for their music, movies, and software; in the process making pirated media superior to bought media.
Well, I think the cool thing about this, to some people (not necessarily me) is that its a PC in a Robot. Assuming you can also use this as a regular PC, this might have appeal as a novel gaming PC or whatever.
But like others, I'm surprised Heathkit is still around. I built a Vox Combo Organ from scratch that Heathkit offered in kit form back in the day. Wasn't very reliable, though. Some of the springs on the keys broke off after I had pounded on it for a year or two. Not Heathkit's fault, since they were just supplying the standard Vox components.
Who really has time to read a newspaper anymore? With the internet, cable TV, video games, a wife and kids, and a job, how many people have an hour or two extra to read the paper also. I have a bunch of magazines piled up that I've never gotten around to reading because I spend so much time on the internet.
I find that, lack of driver support aside (for which I really can't blame MS)
Why is it that Microsoft gets to release Vista and make billions of dollars, but Hardware Manufacturers are expected to spend money writing drivers for old equipment?
Instead of making Vista compatible with XP drivers, Microsoft broke the old driver model, in part to implement their DRM schemes, which are designed to give them more control and make them more money. The new driver model is difficult and expensive to code for. And Hardware Manufacturers are supposed to lose money doing this, so people will be more inclined to upgrade to Vista so Microsoft can make more money?
Microsoft is the one that profits from this. They should pay for writing the new drivers.
If I still had mod points I'd mod you up. I can't believe your still at 1. People who think the free market will solve everything need to stop living in a fantasy world.
OK, here is the deal... I just bought over $200 worth of music on CD and I absolutely guarantee that this will be the last music purchase I make from any RIAA backed artist unless they start recognizing fair use.
I've got you beat there. I've spent over $600 on CDs in the last six months because I got a new mp3 player and I wanted some new music to refresh my playlist. I don't download music. Almost all the music on my player I ripped from CDs I've bought. If I couldn't transfer the music to my mp3 player, I wouldn't buy the CDs, because I mainly listen to music on my MP3 player nowadays. I am not interested in buying DRM encrusted music off the net, nor am I interested in pirating music off the net. If they ban me from transferring music to my mp3 player, I'll have no reason to buy CDs.
This make sense to me in some ways. I know people who were caught poaching fish (catching more than their license allowed). They had their fishing rods taken away, as well as their boat, and the truck that they towed the boat, and just about anything else that was even remotely involved in the crime. It may seem a little excessive, but it's quite a deterrent. Getting your computer taken away for sharing copyrighted content seems to be in alignment with most of the other laws I've seen.
Yea, man. Let's cut of someone's hand if he steals a loaf of bread! That would be a deterrent. And if someone curses at a judge in a courtroom, let's cut out his tongue. And if someone jaywalks, let's cut off his legs. That would be a deterrent.
The punishment should fit the crime. Catching a few fish over limit does not justify taking someones boat and truck. Maybe the rods. Excessive punishment for crimes is criminal. The judges and cops and politicians who do these sort of things are the ones who should be in jail.
That you were modded five sickens me. What a bunch of facists on slashdot.
My thanks to you and the many other excellent answers given by the posters. Your answer was the clearest and easiest to understand. Its been years and years since I took a course in physics, back in the early 70s, and I don't remember many details, considering all the drugs I was taking in those years.
Can you answer this question? How can the moon have only about 1/80 of earth's mass, but have almost 1/6 the gravity? I would think gravity would be linearly proportional to mass.
Related to what you said is the fact that all of these thousands of restrictions, wiretaps, loss of freedoms, etc. by the U.S. government have nothing to do with why 9-11 happened. 9-11 happened because the people at the top ignored the warnings. Ashcroft himself was warned something was going on. Condi Rice was warned. All the info was there. It was the incompetent leaders at the top who ignored the warnings. It was their fuckup, and their response is to turn the U.S. into a fascist state.
Well, a good piano library can be 1 to 2 gigs. I have several that size. I have a guitar library that spans several DVDs. This library samples every string at every fret, with samples for different velocity levels, different styles of picking, pull ons and pull offs, bends, harmonics, muted, thousands of chords, etc. Sample libraries for the major PC samplers, Kontakt and Gigastudio, can be huge. They are several magnitudes larger the the samples built into even pro keyboards, unless the keyboard has its own hard disk.
Horns - French, trumpet, trombone, and stings - violin, viola, cellos can also have large libraries. Some libaries are fairly small, like electric piano, or an electric organ. Sample libraries for a good pipe organ, though, can again be several gigs.
Of course, for all these instruments, their are smaller libraries available, with less velocity levels, less articulations, etc.
I play sample libraries with a Kawai MP 9500 keyboard hooked up to my PC. It has four programmable zones I can divide the keyboard into, and set an instrument to each zone. Thus, bass, piano, guitar, horn. I can also overlap the instruments, so I can have a violin on top of a piano. If I have to many large libraries loaded, and play too fast, the hard disk won't be able to keep up, and the sampler will stutter. Of course, a 10,000 rpm hard disk would help, or a raid array. Or a solid state drive.
Flash drives seem tailor made for music samplers which can stream off the hard disk, such as Kontakt, Gigastudio, and LinuxSampler.
Samples can contain hundreds or thousands of small files. A good piano sample may contain samples for 88 notes, each note having sample files for 8 to 16 different volume levels, release samples, close and far miking samples, etc. Reading these samples in real time puts a lot of demands on a hard drive. Plus, with most samplers, you can have multiple instruments loaded, and you can overlay instruments. So having an instrument bank of full of piano, horns, drums, violin, and guitar samples can bring a hard drive to its knees.
Once you've written your samples to the flash drive, there will be only a limited need to rewrite. So the write speeds and rewrite limitations won't be a problem.
Flash drive should give a huge boost to the performance of music samplers.
Good post. I said something along these lines in a post I made. I think its ridiculous that software has all these special privileges that other products don't have. Can't return it if you don't like it, or its a piece of crap, etc. Software makers talk about piracy, but I've been pirated out of sizable chunk of money by software I've bought that was crappy, didn't suit my needs, etc. but was stuck with but couldn't return. Since they have these strict Internet registration schemes now for copy protection, why can't you return software now if you don't like it?
I think the problem with software is software makers have rights way beyond that of makers of material goods, for a product that is then nearly free reproduce. Sure one can argue, well its intellectual property, and its of a different nature then material goods. Well, there's just as much intellectual property in an Intel or AMD processor as there is in any software, or in an automobile for that mater. And then it cost vastly more to make copies of those products. But they don't have near the after sale control over their product as software makers have. I can resell my AMD processor and my Chevy, but I can't resell my software.
Secondly, Led Zeppelin was really a 1970's group, not 1960's.
Well, they started out in the late sixties, as did Alice Cooper and many of the best seventies groups. The copyright date on both Zep's first and second albums is 1969 (I always thought there first album was their best, btw). The Sixties was by far the best decade in rock music, by an order of a magnitude. Most the best seventies groups actually began in the sixties, which would technically make them sixties groups that spilled over into the seventies. Most of the seventies music was second rate compared to the sixties, although better then most of what followed in succeeding decades
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Even 'Plastic Guitar' is a stretch. Its not a plastic guitar. It is not by any stretch a musical instrument. Its an input device programed for a specific game. A real musical instrument can be played with any piece of music. Could you use the 'guitar' from guitar hero to play along with Kristy Lee Cook while she plays a country version of 'Eight Days a Week' on American Idol? Or use it play along with any song someone picks out of the blue? If not, its not a musical instrument.
I wonder what would happen to someone who worked at Microsoft and wore that shirt. Get fired, probably. At least that's how companies react to such things in my experience.
It would still be possible to have habitable moons orbiting gas giants in the habitable zone. Titan and Ganymede are both moons the size of small planet, and Titan has an atmosphere. Europa is covered in ice. Though a moon in the habital zone would have to be closer to Earth size to retain a significant atmosphere, e.g. Mars has only a very thin atmosphere.
Well, if you read WV as VW it means your dyslexic.
why is it so disrespectful to show a picture of Muhammad? and if pictures are so bad why do they not ban cameras outright?
And, taking that further, since they think images of people are wrong, they should ban TV.
Muslims are still stuck in the dark ages. The Christian Churches were pretty intolerant and brutal against non-believers five or six hundred years ago. Much like today's Muslims.
there is the another side of the coin. Does a small group of mega corporations have the right to hog significant chunks of the nation's bandwidth for their own personal profit, at no cost to them. The worst offender would be downloading and streaming movies. How about in the future when HD movies take off, and we're all downloading and streaming HD movies to watch on our 65" flat screen HD TVs. That would eat up huge amounts of bandwidth. Do we want to subsidize the oligarchy of Hollywood movie studios and their distributors?
What you say is very true. Unfortunately proactive work, which can save companies thousands or even millions, or even save companies, is seldom appreciated by clueless bosses.
And this is the problem with most DRM schemes. They do nothing to solve the real problems of pirated media, and instead put all kinds of shackles on the people who actually pay good money for their music, movies, and software; in the process making pirated media superior to bought media.
Well, I think the cool thing about this, to some people (not necessarily me) is that its a PC in a Robot. Assuming you can also use this as a regular PC, this might have appeal as a novel gaming PC or whatever.
But like others, I'm surprised Heathkit is still around. I built a Vox Combo Organ from scratch that Heathkit offered in kit form back in the day. Wasn't very reliable, though. Some of the springs on the keys broke off after I had pounded on it for a year or two. Not Heathkit's fault, since they were just supplying the standard Vox components.
Who really has time to read a newspaper anymore? With the internet, cable TV, video games, a wife and kids, and a job, how many people have an hour or two extra to read the paper also. I have a bunch of magazines piled up that I've never gotten around to reading because I spend so much time on the internet.
I find that, lack of driver support aside (for which I really can't blame MS)
Why is it that Microsoft gets to release Vista and make billions of dollars, but Hardware Manufacturers are expected to spend money writing drivers for old equipment?
Instead of making Vista compatible with XP drivers, Microsoft broke the old driver model, in part to implement their DRM schemes, which are designed to give them more control and make them more money. The new driver model is difficult and expensive to code for. And Hardware Manufacturers are supposed to lose money doing this, so people will be more inclined to upgrade to Vista so Microsoft can make more money?
Microsoft is the one that profits from this. They should pay for writing the new drivers.
If I still had mod points I'd mod you up. I can't believe your still at 1. People who think the free market will solve everything need to stop living in a fantasy world.
OK, here is the deal... I just bought over $200 worth of music on CD and I absolutely guarantee that this will be the last music purchase I make from any RIAA backed artist unless they start recognizing fair use.
I've got you beat there. I've spent over $600 on CDs in the last six months because I got a new mp3 player and I wanted some new music to refresh my playlist. I don't download music. Almost all the music on my player I ripped from CDs I've bought. If I couldn't transfer the music to my mp3 player, I wouldn't buy the CDs, because I mainly listen to music on my MP3 player nowadays. I am not interested in buying DRM encrusted music off the net, nor am I interested in pirating music off the net. If they ban me from transferring music to my mp3 player, I'll have no reason to buy CDs.
This make sense to me in some ways. I know people who were caught poaching fish (catching more than their license allowed). They had their fishing rods taken away, as well as their boat, and the truck that they towed the boat, and just about anything else that was even remotely involved in the crime. It may seem a little excessive, but it's quite a deterrent. Getting your computer taken away for sharing copyrighted content seems to be in alignment with most of the other laws I've seen.
Yea, man. Let's cut of someone's hand if he steals a loaf of bread! That would be a deterrent. And if someone curses at a judge in a courtroom, let's cut out his tongue. And if someone jaywalks, let's cut off his legs. That would be a deterrent.
The punishment should fit the crime. Catching a few fish over limit does not justify taking someones boat and truck. Maybe the rods. Excessive punishment for crimes is criminal. The judges and cops and politicians who do these sort of things are the ones who should be in jail.
That you were modded five sickens me. What a bunch of facists on slashdot.
It's truly sad that our society has not accepted a behavior that is present in almost all animal species.
I've never seen or heard of a gay cat or dog, or chicken or rooster. Being gay is automatically weeded out by evolution.
My thanks to you and the many other excellent answers given by the posters. Your answer was the clearest and easiest to understand. Its been years and years since I took a course in physics, back in the early 70s, and I don't remember many details, considering all the drugs I was taking in those years.
Can you answer this question? How can the moon have only about 1/80 of earth's mass, but have almost 1/6 the gravity? I would think gravity would be linearly proportional to mass.
Related to what you said is the fact that all of these thousands of restrictions, wiretaps, loss of freedoms, etc. by the U.S. government have nothing to do with why 9-11 happened. 9-11 happened because the people at the top ignored the warnings. Ashcroft himself was warned something was going on. Condi Rice was warned. All the info was there. It was the incompetent leaders at the top who ignored the warnings. It was their fuckup, and their response is to turn the U.S. into a fascist state.
Well, a good piano library can be 1 to 2 gigs. I have several that size. I have a guitar library that spans several DVDs. This library samples every string at every fret, with samples for different velocity levels, different styles of picking, pull ons and pull offs, bends, harmonics, muted, thousands of chords, etc. Sample libraries for the major PC samplers, Kontakt and Gigastudio, can be huge. They are several magnitudes larger the the samples built into even pro keyboards, unless the keyboard has its own hard disk.
Horns - French, trumpet, trombone, and stings - violin, viola, cellos can also have large libraries. Some libaries are fairly small, like electric piano, or an electric organ. Sample libraries for a good pipe organ, though, can again be several gigs.
Of course, for all these instruments, their are smaller libraries available, with less velocity levels, less articulations, etc.
I play sample libraries with a Kawai MP 9500 keyboard hooked up to my PC. It has four programmable zones I can divide the keyboard into, and set an instrument to each zone. Thus, bass, piano, guitar, horn. I can also overlap the instruments, so I can have a violin on top of a piano. If I have to many large libraries loaded, and play too fast, the hard disk won't be able to keep up, and the sampler will stutter. Of course, a 10,000 rpm hard disk would help, or a raid array. Or a solid state drive.
Flash drives seem tailor made for music samplers which can stream off the hard disk, such as Kontakt, Gigastudio, and LinuxSampler.
Samples can contain hundreds or thousands of small files. A good piano sample may contain samples for 88 notes, each note having sample files for 8 to 16 different volume levels, release samples, close and far miking samples, etc. Reading these samples in real time puts a lot of demands on a hard drive. Plus, with most samplers, you can have multiple instruments loaded, and you can overlay instruments. So having an instrument bank of full of piano, horns, drums, violin, and guitar samples can bring a hard drive to its knees.
Once you've written your samples to the flash drive, there will be only a limited need to rewrite. So the write speeds and rewrite limitations won't be a problem.
Flash drive should give a huge boost to the performance of music samplers.
That's could be modded insightful, because to play the disc you have to crack it, violating the DMCA.
Good post. I said something along these lines in a post I made. I think its ridiculous that software has all these special privileges that other products don't have. Can't return it if you don't like it, or its a piece of crap, etc. Software makers talk about piracy, but I've been pirated out of sizable chunk of money by software I've bought that was crappy, didn't suit my needs, etc. but was stuck with but couldn't return. Since they have these strict Internet registration schemes now for copy protection, why can't you return software now if you don't like it?
I think the problem with software is software makers have rights way beyond that of makers of material goods, for a product that is then nearly free reproduce. Sure one can argue, well its intellectual property, and its of a different nature then material goods. Well, there's just as much intellectual property in an Intel or AMD processor as there is in any software, or in an automobile for that mater. And then it cost vastly more to make copies of those products. But they don't have near the after sale control over their product as software makers have. I can resell my AMD processor and my Chevy, but I can't resell my software.
Wow, a comment that actually discusses the article. A slashdot novelty. If I had mod points I'd mod you up.
Secondly, Led Zeppelin was really a 1970's group, not 1960's.
Well, they started out in the late sixties, as did Alice Cooper and many of the best seventies groups. The copyright date on both Zep's first and second albums is 1969 (I always thought there first album was their best, btw). The Sixties was by far the best decade in rock music, by an order of a magnitude. Most the best seventies groups actually began in the sixties, which would technically make them sixties groups that spilled over into the seventies. Most of the seventies music was second rate compared to the sixties, although better then most of what followed in succeeding decades