Yes, if performances were created which were themselves unencumbered (or Creative Commonsed).
Now, while there will be a paid for market for top notch polished performances, I would have thought that there are student performers - pianists, violinists, organists, and choirs and orchestras - who would be dead chuffed to have their performances recorded and shared. As a youngling I played in various youth orchestras, and we would give a concert each school holidays to which our parents and friends would come. There is definitely a layer of performers who aren't going to get a recording contract but who are good enough to be pleasing to listen to, and it would surely be possible for their performances to be recorded and shared.
An awful lot of people make music all over the world without being paid for it - for example, each Sunday when I play the organ in church. It shouldn't be beyond us to record and share music which is in the Public Domain
I don't know how it will work in the US, but I would have thought that while this tactic is fine for the advertiser it's not so great for the advertising agency. I don't work in advertising, but in most similar fields an adverse ruling from the watchdog body is a serious issue, and affect the reputations of the agency and the executive running the campaign long after the advertiser themselves have moved on.
Being a voluntary body, the ASA can only issue a ruling, but as soon as self regulation by the industry starts to be undermined by intentionally misleading campaigns, as you describe, there will be pressure on and from government to introduce statutory regulation.
But rather than running multiple OS images in z900 domains, it will be even more cost effective to run a single Solaris 10 (SPARC or X86) image with applications running in zones.
Thanks for the post - I'm glad my licence fee is going towards useful R&D in the true BBC tradition.
My big fear is that in all the political machinations at the BBC these sorts of endeavours, as well as the Dirac codec development, could get axed or shut down by mistake. Do you find that flying below radar coverage is the best tactic, or should positive reinforcement of this work be sent into normal BBC feedback channels?
Because they have a chosen streaming audio technology: Real. The OGG streams were never more than a trial/proof of concept, and the kit on which it was running was needed for something else.
A huge amount of effort and expense would have been needed to get the OGG streams up to production standard for all the radio stations, not to mention the need to train up support staff etc. I don't think that leaving the experimental services publicly visible for any length of time was ever going to be a starter.
Besides, if the BBC were to invest in moving off Real right now, the shoe in choice would be WMP, and another change would be off the agenda for years. Remember that they started transmitting television on UHF shortly after the end of the Second World War, yet it was the 1980s before they were able to turn off the VHF trasmitters. By holding fire until there is a coherent set of audio *and* video formats there is a much better chance such a switch will come off.
The Proms this year is celebrating English music, and the crossroads it reached in 1934 - Elgar, Holst and Delius died in 1934, while Peter Maxwell Davis and Harrison Birtwhistle were born in 1934.
It would be a great tribute to Elgar, Delius and Holst if, as their music comes out of copyright at the end of this year, their work was to truly enter teh public domain - the Mutopia project springs to mind.
Sadly, it will be another 15 years before Vaughan WIlliams enters the public domain, as I want to use some of his sacred music, but the royalties quoted by the copyright holder are too much.
Many of the shortfalls in making Windows suitable for use as a corporate desktop are now being addressed, but it is still a support headache for most organisations.
Often the filtering and promotion mechanism is hardworking DJs - radio stations get endless material sent in all the time, and if they can play something and then give details of how to get it for free on P2P then the industry has been completely bypassed.
Essentially we are seeing the cathedral of the music industry giving way to a bazaar based around P2P. This could be, creatively, a very interesting time to live.
Piracy is still rife in some parts of the world, and not only do shipping firms lose their vessels and cargoes but the crews are often murdered as well.
Hmm, sounds as if some of these software vendors need to learn the lesson Microsoft appears to have learned: if you stop people using illegal copies of your software, they may use something else rather than give you money.
Translation: sometimes it's more valuable to have an extensive installed base of illegally copied software; the alternative might be an extensive installed base of rival free software.
In the old world there was a simple distinction: either a band was signed to a label, in which case the label dictated their term, whether they were promoted etc; or the band wasn't signed to a label and had no channel to get their music to listeners.
In the new world, P2P is an alternative channel between producers and consumers in which record companies have no control - the process has become disintermediated. In this world you have the appalling prospect (for the companies) that talented, affluent people will make music because they enjoy it, and and then distribute it via P2P networks so that people can listen to it and enjoy it without paying them.
In essence, the scarcity of music distribution has ended, and the beneficiaries of this scarcity (the record companies) are seeing their business model starting to fail. They're doomed, and they know they're doomed, but they're also keen to prolong their dominion as long as they can.
Repeat after me: "Illegal copying is not theft, it is illegal copying".
The equating of illegal copying with property theft is now so widespread that it doesn't attract comment: this is bad. Those who misuse the language in this way should always be corrected.
SunOS 4.0.3 SunOS 4.1 SunOS 4.1.1 SunOS 4.1.1 Rev B SunOS 4.1.2 (badged as Solaris 1.0.2 IIRC) SunOS 4.1.3 - produced to support SuperSparc SunOS 4.1.3 (can't remember the sub numbering)... produced to support MicroSparc SunOS 4.1.4 - the last version of SunOS 4, can't remember it's Solaris numbering
Then we start on the Solaris range, which progressed sensibly up to 2.6 (except for 2.5.1 which I assume was some urgently needed kernel API changes). Then onto Solaris 7 (SunOS 5.7) and upwards.
Version numbering is a whole area in and of itself - we've seen Veritas go through major changes to get a consistent set of version numbers across VxVM, VxFS and VCS.
The merits of Tesco online have been well discussed in this thread. It was a bit ropy when launched, but is now slick enough that it only takes 10 minutes to put an order in, and lots of people use it regularly. Instead of driving 20 minutes each way and handling each item six times (item off shelf into trolley; item out of trolley onto belt; item off belt into bag into trolley; items out of trolley into car; items out of car into house; items into cupboard) I handle them twice (bags from doorstep into house; items into cupboard).
The supermarkets now have to offer this service to defend their market share. The profit from Internet shopping isn't from the fiver they charge for picking and delivery, it's from the profit margin on 100 quids worth of groceries. Their option is either to offer a delivery service or to lose the sale to someone who does.
With RFID tags on everything the process will become even easier. Your fridge and cupboards will have a continuous inventory of what you have, and so your regular order can be filled in automatically as stocks of things are depleted. OK, so your fridge won't know that your mates are going to come round and drink all your beer, but it can order some more for you. And for the things which get depleted at a more even rate (coffee, loo roll) you would find it just turned up in your weekly order when it was running low.
So while online ordering -> grocery delivery is great, it should be seen as a first step in a much more far reaching process.
Better than that the adverts are themselves rated in order of which ones people tend to click through, so the adverts you are most likely to be interested in are listed first. You pay when people click on your advert, not for displaying it - though if your click through rate drops below a certain level the advert gets dropped.
Last year I ran an advert for some pages I put up when they were considering building a massive new airport near my home town of Rugby. I keyed my advert against the phrase "Rugby Airport", and achieved a click through rating of something like 5%, so my advert was always at the top, ahead of all the airport car parking and rugby football memorabilia adverts. It also meant that is was only seen by people who were specifically searching for information about the new airport, so I didn't pay for click throughs (clicks through?) from people who were looking for something else.
By bringing my site to people's attention via these adverts I started getting more sites linking to mine, and *that* is how my site climbed the search rankings. Of course, if my advert had pointed to a site with rubbish content then that wouldn't have happened.
Don't forget Turing's Bombes, which ran at Bletchley park deciphering intercepted German signals (see http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/ww2.html). Of course, the real father of programmable computing was Tommy Flowers, who seems to have been largely forgotten.
Well, I signed up for Just1key to avoid writing them down. It also means that you don't have to carry a little book around, as you can get your passwords with any browser.
I have Firefox configured to go out on port 80 via proxomitron - and my laptop is configured with a personal firewall which alerts whenever connections are being made outside its ruleset.
For some reason browsing this site causes Firefox to go out directly on port 80 rather than honouring the proxy configured in it. What on earth could be causing this?
Sun keep the kernel API completely static for any particular Solaris release. When Solaris 8 was first released, there were no UltraSparc III boxen on the general market (though they will obviously have been running in the lab).
There were assorted hardware updates made as new product lines were rolled out, including all the Serengeti machines and the F15K, all achieved without kernel API changes. But I would guess that there was a shed load of API queuing up for the next Solaris release.
To Sun's very great credit, it's not often that patches within a Solaris version cause anything to break. They seamlessly added IP Multipathing and filesystem snapshotting during the lifetime of Solaris 8 (and journalling ufs during the lifetime of Solaris 7) - in contrast, just think about how things break whenever Windows service packs are applied (NT4 SP3 particularly springs to mind).
The alternative is that you score the music for the number of musicians available. The great composers didn't write for a symphony orchestra comprised of a few players and a computer - they wrote chamber music.
If the performance space won't accomodate the previous number of musicians, it is likely that to synthesise a band of the same size will overpower the space in which the performance is being staged.
It is the same mentality as putting an all-singing-all-dancing electronic organ with the range of the most exotic instrument into a small church. In previous ages, small churches had small organs which suited the space, and the resourceful organist could extract a good range from them.
To just use the same scoring as before, and fill in half the blanks with a machine seems an artistically bankrupt approach.
The difference doesn't matter. Its only purpose is to allow MS to sell kosher XP licences much more cheaply in certain parts of the world.
Remember that the push by the US to reduce the amount of illegally copied software in many countries has had a damaging effect on Microsoft. The options have changed from: a) illegal MS software - cheap and perfectly acceptable b) licensed MS software - perfectly acceptable but expensive c) free software - free/cheap and perfectly acceptable
to a) illegal MS software - cheap but less acceptable than previously b) licensed MS software - perfectly acceptable but expensive c) free software - free/cheap and perfectly acceptable
So the push by the US government to reduce illegal copying will result in a loss of market share for MS (yes, they may get a few more properly licensed copies, but they'd rather have ubiquity on the desktop).
Now, MS clearly can't publicly say in those countries "We'd rather you ran illegal copies of Windows than Linux", so this is their attempt to provide a legitimate means of preventing their market share slipping away from illegal Windows to free software.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, if performances were created which were themselves unencumbered (or Creative Commonsed).
Now, while there will be a paid for market for top notch polished performances, I would have thought that there are student performers - pianists, violinists, organists, and choirs and orchestras - who would be dead chuffed to have their performances recorded and shared. As a youngling I played in various youth orchestras, and we would give a concert each school holidays to which our parents and friends would come. There is definitely a layer of performers who aren't going to get a recording contract but who are good enough to be pleasing to listen to, and it would surely be possible for their performances to be recorded and shared.
An awful lot of people make music all over the world without being paid for it - for example, each Sunday when I play the organ in church. It shouldn't be beyond us to record and share music which is in the Public Domain
Dunstan
I don't know how it will work in the US, but I would have thought that while this tactic is fine for the advertiser it's not so great for the advertising agency. I don't work in advertising, but in most similar fields an adverse ruling from the watchdog body is a serious issue, and affect the reputations of the agency and the executive running the campaign long after the advertiser themselves have moved on.
Being a voluntary body, the ASA can only issue a ruling, but as soon as self regulation by the industry starts to be undermined by intentionally misleading campaigns, as you describe, there will be pressure on and from government to introduce statutory regulation.
D.
But rather than running multiple OS images in z900 domains, it will be even more cost effective to run a single Solaris 10 (SPARC or X86) image with applications running in zones.
D.
And, more to the point, are they going to put the control key where God meant it to be, and consign the caps lock key to somewhere out of the way?
Dunstan
Thanks for the post - I'm glad my licence fee is going towards useful R&D in the true BBC tradition.
My big fear is that in all the political machinations at the BBC these sorts of endeavours, as well as the Dirac codec development, could get axed or shut down by mistake. Do you find that flying below radar coverage is the best tactic, or should positive reinforcement of this work be sent into normal BBC feedback channels?
D.
Because they have a chosen streaming audio technology: Real. The OGG streams were never more than a trial/proof of concept, and the kit on which it was running was needed for something else.
A huge amount of effort and expense would have been needed to get the OGG streams up to production standard for all the radio stations, not to mention the need to train up support staff etc. I don't think that leaving the experimental services publicly visible for any length of time was ever going to be a starter.
Besides, if the BBC were to invest in moving off Real right now, the shoe in choice would be WMP, and another change would be off the agenda for years. Remember that they started transmitting television on UHF shortly after the end of the Second World War, yet it was the 1980s before they were able to turn off the VHF trasmitters. By holding fire until there is a coherent set of audio *and* video formats there is a much better chance such a switch will come off.
Dunstan
Like this?
Dunstan
The Proms this year is celebrating English music, and the crossroads it reached in 1934 - Elgar, Holst and Delius died in 1934, while Peter Maxwell Davis and Harrison Birtwhistle were born in 1934.
It would be a great tribute to Elgar, Delius and Holst if, as their music comes out of copyright at the end of this year, their work was to truly enter teh public domain - the Mutopia project springs to mind.
Sadly, it will be another 15 years before Vaughan WIlliams enters the public domain, as I want to use some of his sacred music, but the royalties quoted by the copyright holder are too much.
Dunstan
... is the real question.
Many of the shortfalls in making Windows suitable for use as a corporate desktop are now being addressed, but it is still a support headache for most organisations.
Dunstan
Often the filtering and promotion mechanism is hardworking DJs - radio stations get endless material sent in all the time, and if they can play something and then give details of how to get it for free on P2P then the industry has been completely bypassed.
Essentially we are seeing the cathedral of the music industry giving way to a bazaar based around P2P. This could be, creatively, a very interesting time to live.
D.
Piracy is still rife in some parts of the world, and not only do shipping firms lose their vessels and cargoes but the crews are often murdered as well.
D.
Hmm, sounds as if some of these software vendors need to learn the lesson Microsoft appears to have learned: if you stop people using illegal copies of your software, they may use something else rather than give you money.
Translation: sometimes it's more valuable to have an extensive installed base of illegally copied software; the alternative might be an extensive installed base of rival free software.
D.
It goes deeper than this.
In the old world there was a simple distinction: either a band was signed to a label, in which case the label dictated their term, whether they were promoted etc; or the band wasn't signed to a label and had no channel to get their music to listeners.
In the new world, P2P is an alternative channel between producers and consumers in which record companies have no control - the process has become disintermediated. In this world you have the appalling prospect (for the companies) that talented, affluent people will make music because they enjoy it, and and then distribute it via P2P networks so that people can listen to it and enjoy it without paying them.
In essence, the scarcity of music distribution has ended, and the beneficiaries of this scarcity (the record companies) are seeing their business model starting to fail. They're doomed, and they know they're doomed, but they're also keen to prolong their dominion as long as they can.
Dunstan
Repeat after me: "Illegal copying is not theft, it is illegal copying".
The equating of illegal copying with property theft is now so widespread that it doesn't attract comment: this is bad. Those who misuse the language in this way should always be corrected.
Dunstan
SunOS 4.0.3 ... produced to support MicroSparc
SunOS 4.1
SunOS 4.1.1
SunOS 4.1.1 Rev B
SunOS 4.1.2 (badged as Solaris 1.0.2 IIRC)
SunOS 4.1.3 - produced to support SuperSparc
SunOS 4.1.3 (can't remember the sub numbering)
SunOS 4.1.4 - the last version of SunOS 4, can't remember it's Solaris numbering
Then we start on the Solaris range, which progressed sensibly up to 2.6 (except for 2.5.1 which I assume was some urgently needed kernel API changes). Then onto Solaris 7 (SunOS 5.7) and upwards.
Version numbering is a whole area in and of itself - we've seen Veritas go through major changes to get a consistent set of version numbers across VxVM, VxFS and VCS.
D.
Pictures sent to the BBC by viewers - I particularly liked no 13.
m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/3786705.st
The merits of Tesco online have been well discussed in this thread. It was a bit ropy when launched, but is now slick enough that it only takes 10 minutes to put an order in, and lots of people use it regularly. Instead of driving 20 minutes each way and handling each item six times (item off shelf into trolley; item out of trolley onto belt; item off belt into bag into trolley; items out of trolley into car; items out of car into house; items into cupboard) I handle them twice (bags from doorstep into house; items into cupboard).
The supermarkets now have to offer this service to defend their market share. The profit from Internet shopping isn't from the fiver they charge for picking and delivery, it's from the profit margin on 100 quids worth of groceries. Their option is either to offer a delivery service or to lose the sale to someone who does.
With RFID tags on everything the process will become even easier. Your fridge and cupboards will have a continuous inventory of what you have, and so your regular order can be filled in automatically as stocks of things are depleted. OK, so your fridge won't know that your mates are going to come round and drink all your beer, but it can order some more for you. And for the things which get depleted at a more even rate (coffee, loo roll) you would find it just turned up in your weekly order when it was running low.
So while online ordering -> grocery delivery is great, it should be seen as a first step in a much more far reaching process.
Dunstan
Better than that the adverts are themselves rated in order of which ones people tend to click through, so the adverts you are most likely to be interested in are listed first. You pay when people click on your advert, not for displaying it - though if your click through rate drops below a certain level the advert gets dropped.
Last year I ran an advert for some pages I put up when they were considering building a massive new airport near my home town of Rugby. I keyed my advert against the phrase "Rugby Airport", and achieved a click through rating of something like 5%, so my advert was always at the top, ahead of all the airport car parking and rugby football memorabilia adverts. It also meant that is was only seen by people who were specifically searching for information about the new airport, so I didn't pay for click throughs (clicks through?) from people who were looking for something else.
By bringing my site to people's attention via these adverts I started getting more sites linking to mine, and *that* is how my site climbed the search rankings. Of course, if my advert had pointed to a site with rubbish content then that wouldn't have happened.
Dunstan
Don't forget Turing's Bombes, which ran at Bletchley park deciphering intercepted German signals (see http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/ww2.html ).
Of course, the real father of programmable computing was Tommy Flowers, who seems to have been largely forgotten.
Dunstan
Well, I signed up for Just1key to avoid writing them down. It also means that you don't have to carry a little book around, as you can get your passwords with any browser.
Dunstan
I have Firefox configured to go out on port 80 via proxomitron - and my laptop is configured with a personal firewall which alerts whenever connections are being made outside its ruleset.
For some reason browsing this site causes Firefox to go out directly on port 80 rather than honouring the proxy configured in it. What on earth could be causing this?
Dunstan
Missed out an important part of the TCO equation:
Cost of checking all your estate is licence compliant with Oo - nil.
Risk of being required to demonstrate licence compliance to and auditor for Oo - nil.
Dunstan
Sun keep the kernel API completely static for any particular Solaris release. When Solaris 8 was first released, there were no UltraSparc III boxen on the general market (though they will obviously have been running in the lab).
There were assorted hardware updates made as new product lines were rolled out, including all the Serengeti machines and the F15K, all achieved without kernel API changes. But I would guess that there was a shed load of API queuing up for the next Solaris release.
To Sun's very great credit, it's not often that patches within a Solaris version cause anything to break. They seamlessly added IP Multipathing and filesystem snapshotting during the lifetime of Solaris 8 (and journalling ufs during the lifetime of Solaris 7) - in contrast, just think about how things break whenever Windows service packs are applied (NT4 SP3 particularly springs to mind).
Dunstan
The alternative is that you score the music for the number of musicians available. The great composers didn't write for a symphony orchestra comprised of a few players and a computer - they wrote chamber music.
If the performance space won't accomodate the previous number of musicians, it is likely that to synthesise a band of the same size will overpower the space in which the performance is being staged.
It is the same mentality as putting an all-singing-all-dancing electronic organ with the range of the most exotic instrument into a small church. In previous ages, small churches had small organs which suited the space, and the resourceful organist could extract a good range from them.
To just use the same scoring as before, and fill in half the blanks with a machine seems an artistically bankrupt approach.
Dunstan
The difference doesn't matter. Its only purpose is to allow MS to sell kosher XP licences much more cheaply in certain parts of the world.
Remember that the push by the US to reduce the amount of illegally copied software in many countries has had a damaging effect on Microsoft. The options have changed from:
a) illegal MS software - cheap and perfectly acceptable
b) licensed MS software - perfectly acceptable but expensive
c) free software - free/cheap and perfectly acceptable
to
a) illegal MS software - cheap but less acceptable than previously
b) licensed MS software - perfectly acceptable but expensive
c) free software - free/cheap and perfectly acceptable
So the push by the US government to reduce illegal copying will result in a loss of market share for MS (yes, they may get a few more properly licensed copies, but they'd rather have ubiquity on the desktop).
Now, MS clearly can't publicly say in those countries "We'd rather you ran illegal copies of Windows than Linux", so this is their attempt to provide a legitimate means of preventing their market share slipping away from illegal Windows to free software.
Dunstan