Not implying you didn't know this, but for those who don't, XP accessibility (for handicapped users) already includes something similar as basic behavior on all XP machines.
Try pressing Shift about 5 - 10 times in a row, and Windows should pop up a message suggesting you use a feature called Sticky Keys. Sometimes it will also pop up if you hold it down for more than 8-10 seconds, but I think that's limited to certain applications (Office, maybe). Sticky Keys is supposed to help people who have difficulty holding down keys and dates back to at least Win 98. We once enabled it for a coworker w/ cerebral palsy who had to use the keyboard and mouse at the same time in photoshop -- it made his job a lot easier.
Our VP has a thumbdrive with all this built in. It includes XP partitioning software on a separate, non-removeable partition that handles all the encryption, decryption, access rights, formatting and partitioning. It requires no drivers other than those for USB mass storage, and even somehow manages to automatically prompt you if you haven't already set up security on the device (you can have a secure partition and a "public" partition, or just one of either). No extra software needed, and you can do this without admin rights.
However, it is not OSS and it is Windows only, so YMMV. Unfortunately, I don't have the name of the product, but you can probably find it on amazon.
They're trying to avoid losing their trademark by keeping the name from becoming too mainstream a word. However, do they actually have to succeed in order to maintain the trademark? Or, do they only have to demonstrate that they are trying?
I believe the term in question is dilution, and if I'm not mistaken, you can't stop the public from using your term, but you do have to take measures to remind everybody that the trademark is a brand name of a product, not a type of product. IIRC, Bayer Aspirin used to be called Aspirin, but nobody bothered reminding anybody that Aspirin was a trademarked name, and as such, it no longer was. This is probably why Microsoft is able to call their OS Windows -- even though "window" is a generic term, MS has been careful to distinguish their OS from other windowed operating systems.
No, it's not. Maybe I wasn't clear, so I'll try again... Standard notation records pitch, tablature records position.
A large class of blown instruments (i.e. most woodwinds and brass) are termed "transposing instruments"... having them work with a score where a written middle C would equate to the key a piano player calls "middle C" would require them to learn completely separate sets of fingering for each differently pitched instrument.
This is correct, but that doesn't mean fingering and transposition are the same thing. Transposing is another one of those things a musician is expected to know how to do -- and depending on your focus, you may be expected to memorize the natural key and range of every instrument in an orchestra. Regardless of where concert C is, the notes still represent a pitch. Fingering is a different story. If you've ever read a piano score, you will sometimes see small numbers 1-5 next to some of the noteheads. These are fingering guides, and tell the player where to position his hands. Much music written for piano includes both the noteheads (pitch) and the fingering (position).
Guitar tablature, however, does not include information about pitch. Sometimes, in printed form, publishers will print guitar music on two staves: the one on top written in standard notation (pitch/duration), and the one on bottom in tablature (position). Again, the tablature includes no pitch information. The tuning of the instrument determines the pitches heard, and the tablature must be adjusted to compensate for different tunings. In standard notation, the music is just there, regardless of how the instrument is tuned and does not need adjusted.
Standard notation is thus every bit as positional...
Again, in instruments where you can produce more than one sound, fingering is notated separately. Mateo Carcassi was an 18th (I think) century composer who produced some performance and instructional pieces for guitar. In these (written in standard notation), he actually wrote in three extra sets of information for position: numbers indicating the left hand fingering (economy of motion), dots indicating the right hand fingering (which finger will strike which note), and left hand position (how high up the fret board the student should play a passage).
... as guitar or keyboard tab,...
I really hope the keyboard tab thing is a mistake. Piano is probably the most important instrument for a musician to learn, and playing from tabs is hardly learning. I can't even imagine how you would notate something like this in tab -- the closest I've seen is the piano roll.
... because both contain a set of instructions telling musicians to make various physical movements that will produce a certain pitch, and not a representation of the pitch itself.
This is true, for instruments where more than one fingering is possible. However, standard notation is, strictly speaking, pitch. Here's why: if a trumpet player hands me a score for trumpet, I can play it on guitar from the sheet music, even though I have no idea how the trumpet is fingered. If he handed me a series of fingering diagrams, I couldn't even guess what it would sound like, but he could play it. It works both ways. If I handed him a work written for guitar (in standard notation), he could play it (at least the melody - he can't play chords obviously). If that work was written in tab, however, my horn player can't. Do you see the difference now?
The original copyright term was also something in the range of 17 years.
I'm probably mistaken but I believe it was 14 years, after which you were eligible to apply for an extension for another 14 years, for a maximum of 28 years. Far more reasonable -- the Framers understood knowledge is not something that belongs to man. Information is like God: It Is What It Is. A temporary monopoly rewards creativity, not for novelty's sake, but to encourage the spread of information, knowledge. Now terms are Life + 70 / 95 Corporate. Information artificially controlled for that long falls into oblivion, and nobody remembers it when it enters the public domain. Yeah, we have a lot of public domain stuff now, but nothing less than almost a century old. It falls out of the collective memory, and ceases to beneft society. In fact, as a society, it scares me how ignorant we (the US) are as a people. Bulls*** copyright laws are, I think, a big reason for this.
On the other hand, <flamebait>if the Quran had been under copyright in the 7th century, we wouldn't have terrorism today because nobody would've heard of Islam.</flamebait>
Sheet music tells you things that just aren't in tabulatures: most importantly, note and rest duration. But it also shows other things, like note style (legato/staccato), volume changes ([de]crescendos), and there are other handy things like codas.
If you pick up a copy of Guitar World, you'll see that printed tabs all contain this information now. They're no longer Cliff's Notes, but they're still not all that. You might call tab the musical equivalent to reading a webpage through Babelfish -- yeah, it's translated, and nothing was really lost, but it's just not quite right:/ Also, modern music (including guitar), has information that is not really agreed upon in standard notation (it usually can be notated, but there might be some disagreement between versions), whereas it is (mostly) agreed upon in guitar tablature. Basically, both notations contain a lot of information -- and neither can really represent everything.
Also with sheet music, it is easier to represent more than one instrument on the same page
This is perhaps the most important reason to use standard notation: everybody can read it. No matter how much I'd like it, I can't get a pianist to read tablature. But a good guitarist can read a musical score.
BTW, I'm not really suggesting that tabs are worse than sheet music.
I am!:) Standard notation is not elitist, but it is conventional. It's major advantage is that it records pitch, not position. While that does make it harder to sight-read, it is easier to read (as in look at it and tell what it's doing). Standard notation builds up musical proficiency, tablature only teaches you how to move around a fretboard, with no idea what you're actually doing.
I'm a musician, like music theory, and a guitarist, and I started with tabs and playing by ear, and I can tell you from personal experience what works and why. I am very familiar with OLGA, but all this "lazy way to do it" stuff is driving me crazy! Moxley is 100% correct. Here's the scoop:
Playing by ear: This is the best way to learn to play. All classically trained students take Ear Training - you are expected to be able, upon hearing a note, chord, or rhythm, transcribe or perform what you've just heard. Music is aural.
Reading a staff (not tab): This is the international, trans-era, agreed-upon method by which musicians have communicated for centuries. Everybody who studies music quickly learns there are a lot of things wrong with our notational system, but it was developed over about a millenium, and its too late to change it now. But it's still got a huge advantage over learning by ear and over tablature: I can communicate everything to everybody, regardless of what instrument they play, instantly. Any group larger than a garage band just can't learn a song "by ear", and nobody but guitarists can read tablature (technically, tablature exists for certain other instruments, but it's probably even harder to read than tablature for guitar).
Tablature: Anybody that thinks tab is legitimate, it's not. This really is lazy (and it's how I first learned). Tablature was designed to give people a chance to play the guitar without taking lessons, but I can speak from personal experience: if you are at all serious about music, drop the tab and struggle with the staff and playing by ear. Even if it means you are playing kid stuff. It is possible to pick up a guitar and learn to read tab in a day. Learning to read a staff can take a lifetime. However, the classically trained musician is more skilled by an order of magnitude than somebody "taught" by tab... Tab does have one distinct advantage over standard notation, however: it translates easily to ASCII.
</rant> Sorry, but the whole ear/reading argument is moot - a good musician is expected to maintain both these skills. Tablature is good for hobbyists and for learning over the web.
To be honest, I really wish I heard more of these stories here in the States. I think no news is bad news.
Spoken like a true American. We tend to forget pretty quickly. Umm... remember this from October? Probably not. In fact, I couldn't remember any of the specific plots we foiled, other than Richard Reid (if we can even count the Brits acting on US intel as a win for us).
I think its more a cultural difference, though. American journalists like panic! blood! chaos! I bet you might remember the UNC student who ran down some of his fellow students, or the Muslim fellow in Seattle that shot 6 people (including a pregnant woman) attending synagogue, or the other guy that shot up El Al... Notice that we are enemy #2 (sandwiched between Israel and the UK), but of these, we've had the fewest terrorist acts in our country since 9/11. That means we are stopping attacks. The reason we only hear about failures and not successes is that our media doesn't report when our side wins, they only report catastrophes (I recommend Michael Crichton's State of Fear -- it's well researched and covers this and quite a few other topics).
Probably not. The ill-fated Sega Dreamcast is prior art, and was out before both the PSP and this patent. The DC had an analog control stick, the memory card plugged right into the controller, and the memory card had a digital display that could react to input from the controller (via the console). This basically covers all the claims of the patent: analog input, embedded digital display. In fact, all their patents sound like stuff that had already existed at the time. It's a shame Nintendo & MS will probably determine its cheaper to settle/license/buy portfolio than to bankrupt these clowns in court.
Slashdot Mirror
Not implying you didn't know this, but for those who don't, XP accessibility (for handicapped users) already includes something similar as basic behavior on all XP machines.
Try pressing Shift about 5 - 10 times in a row, and Windows should pop up a message suggesting you use a feature called Sticky Keys. Sometimes it will also pop up if you hold it down for more than 8-10 seconds, but I think that's limited to certain applications (Office, maybe). Sticky Keys is supposed to help people who have difficulty holding down keys and dates back to at least Win 98. We once enabled it for a coworker w/ cerebral palsy who had to use the keyboard and mouse at the same time in photoshop -- it made his job a lot easier.
Our VP has a thumbdrive with all this built in. It includes XP partitioning software on a separate, non-removeable partition that handles all the encryption, decryption, access rights, formatting and partitioning. It requires no drivers other than those for USB mass storage, and even somehow manages to automatically prompt you if you haven't already set up security on the device (you can have a secure partition and a "public" partition, or just one of either). No extra software needed, and you can do this without admin rights.
However, it is not OSS and it is Windows only, so YMMV. Unfortunately, I don't have the name of the product, but you can probably find it on amazon.
Amen.
No, it's not. Maybe I wasn't clear, so I'll try again... Standard notation records pitch, tablature records position.
This is correct, but that doesn't mean fingering and transposition are the same thing. Transposing is another one of those things a musician is expected to know how to do -- and depending on your focus, you may be expected to memorize the natural key and range of every instrument in an orchestra. Regardless of where concert C is, the notes still represent a pitch. Fingering is a different story. If you've ever read a piano score, you will sometimes see small numbers 1-5 next to some of the noteheads. These are fingering guides, and tell the player where to position his hands. Much music written for piano includes both the noteheads (pitch) and the fingering (position).
Guitar tablature, however, does not include information about pitch. Sometimes, in printed form, publishers will print guitar music on two staves: the one on top written in standard notation (pitch/duration), and the one on bottom in tablature (position). Again, the tablature includes no pitch information. The tuning of the instrument determines the pitches heard, and the tablature must be adjusted to compensate for different tunings. In standard notation, the music is just there, regardless of how the instrument is tuned and does not need adjusted.
Again, in instruments where you can produce more than one sound, fingering is notated separately. Mateo Carcassi was an 18th (I think) century composer who produced some performance and instructional pieces for guitar. In these (written in standard notation), he actually wrote in three extra sets of information for position: numbers indicating the left hand fingering (economy of motion), dots indicating the right hand fingering (which finger will strike which note), and left hand position (how high up the fret board the student should play a passage).
I really hope the keyboard tab thing is a mistake. Piano is probably the most important instrument for a musician to learn, and playing from tabs is hardly learning. I can't even imagine how you would notate something like this in tab -- the closest I've seen is the piano roll.
This is true, for instruments where more than one fingering is possible. However, standard notation is, strictly speaking, pitch. Here's why: if a trumpet player hands me a score for trumpet, I can play it on guitar from the sheet music, even though I have no idea how the trumpet is fingered. If he handed me a series of fingering diagrams, I couldn't even guess what it would sound like, but he could play it. It works both ways. If I handed him a work written for guitar (in standard notation), he could play it (at least the melody - he can't play chords obviously). If that work was written in tab, however, my horn player can't. Do you see the difference now?
Mmm... nope. Still not getting it. Do I get to keep the quarter?
I'm probably mistaken but I believe it was 14 years, after which you were eligible to apply for an extension for another 14 years, for a maximum of 28 years. Far more reasonable -- the Framers understood knowledge is not something that belongs to man. Information is like God: It Is What It Is. A temporary monopoly rewards creativity, not for novelty's sake, but to encourage the spread of information, knowledge. Now terms are Life + 70 / 95 Corporate. Information artificially controlled for that long falls into oblivion, and nobody remembers it when it enters the public domain. Yeah, we have a lot of public domain stuff now, but nothing less than almost a century old. It falls out of the collective memory, and ceases to beneft society. In fact, as a society, it scares me how ignorant we (the US) are as a people. Bulls*** copyright laws are, I think, a big reason for this.
On the other hand, <flamebait>if the Quran had been under copyright in the 7th century, we wouldn't have terrorism today because nobody would've heard of Islam.</flamebait>
If you pick up a copy of Guitar World, you'll see that printed tabs all contain this information now. They're no longer Cliff's Notes, but they're still not all that. You might call tab the musical equivalent to reading a webpage through Babelfish -- yeah, it's translated, and nothing was really lost, but it's just not quite right :/ Also, modern music (including guitar), has information that is not really agreed upon in standard notation (it usually can be notated, but there might be some disagreement between versions), whereas it is (mostly) agreed upon in guitar tablature. Basically, both notations contain a lot of information -- and neither can really represent everything.
This is perhaps the most important reason to use standard notation: everybody can read it. No matter how much I'd like it, I can't get a pianist to read tablature. But a good guitarist can read a musical score.
I am! :) Standard notation is not elitist, but it is conventional. It's major advantage is that it records pitch, not position. While that does make it harder to sight-read, it is easier to read (as in look at it and tell what it's doing). Standard notation builds up musical proficiency, tablature only teaches you how to move around a fretboard, with no idea what you're actually doing.
- Playing by ear: This is the best way to learn to play. All classically trained students take Ear Training - you are expected to be able, upon hearing a note, chord, or rhythm, transcribe or perform what you've just heard. Music is aural.
- Reading a staff (not tab): This is the international, trans-era, agreed-upon method by which musicians have communicated for centuries. Everybody who studies music quickly learns there are a lot of things wrong with our notational system, but it was developed over about a millenium, and its too late to change it now. But it's still got a huge advantage over learning by ear and over tablature: I can communicate everything to everybody, regardless of what instrument they play, instantly. Any group larger than a garage band just can't learn a song "by ear", and nobody but guitarists can read tablature (technically, tablature exists for certain other instruments, but it's probably even harder to read than tablature for guitar).
- Tablature: Anybody that thinks tab is legitimate, it's not. This really is lazy (and it's how I first learned). Tablature was designed to give people a chance to play the guitar without taking lessons, but I can speak from personal experience: if you are at all serious about music, drop the tab and struggle with the staff and playing by ear. Even if it means you are playing kid stuff. It is possible to pick up a guitar and learn to read tab in a day. Learning to read a staff can take a lifetime. However, the classically trained musician is more skilled by an order of magnitude than somebody "taught" by tab... Tab does have one distinct advantage over standard notation, however: it translates easily to ASCII.
</rant> Sorry, but the whole ear/reading argument is moot - a good musician is expected to maintain both these skills. Tablature is good for hobbyists and for learning over the web.Spoken like a true American. We tend to forget pretty quickly. Umm... remember this from October? Probably not. In fact, I couldn't remember any of the specific plots we foiled, other than Richard Reid (if we can even count the Brits acting on US intel as a win for us).
I think its more a cultural difference, though. American journalists like panic! blood! chaos! I bet you might remember the UNC student who ran down some of his fellow students, or the Muslim fellow in Seattle that shot 6 people (including a pregnant woman) attending synagogue, or the other guy that shot up El Al... Notice that we are enemy #2 (sandwiched between Israel and the UK), but of these, we've had the fewest terrorist acts in our country since 9/11. That means we are stopping attacks. The reason we only hear about failures and not successes is that our media doesn't report when our side wins, they only report catastrophes (I recommend Michael Crichton's State of Fear -- it's well researched and covers this and quite a few other topics).
Probably not. The ill-fated Sega Dreamcast is prior art, and was out before both the PSP and this patent. The DC had an analog control stick, the memory card plugged right into the controller, and the memory card had a digital display that could react to input from the controller (via the console). This basically covers all the claims of the patent: analog input, embedded digital display. In fact, all their patents sound like stuff that had already existed at the time. It's a shame Nintendo & MS will probably determine its cheaper to settle/license/buy portfolio than to bankrupt these clowns in court.