Keith Hudson
Tue, 12 Oct 1999 00:51:56 -0700
Ray, I don't think this list has ever had a ban on attachments. When they appear, it's either a case of thoughtlessness (usually by tyros) or sheer bad manners. Sensible people never open attachments unless they know precisely what's in them. When I had a new hard disc a week or two ago my consultant took away my old one and found two viruses there which were waiting to be activated. But there was no possibility that I'd ever open the attachments that contained them. At 21:44 11/10/99 -0400, you wrote: >I believe this list has ban on attachments. > >As for web sites, I rarely look since I find the >content is often more out of context than a dialogue on >list. Oh, what a pity, Haven't you looked at mine? An attachment is to me, a footnote which may or >may not be opened. I often do not open it if the >person has convinced me that they are doctrinaire or >predictable in their answers. I make a distinction >between repetition and predictable because repetition >can be quite surprising and interesting as the minimal >soho composers like Reich and Glass have shown. Ah! I happen to think that they and many more like them are tricksters -- the Emperor's new clothes and all that. They're not intentional tricksters, of course, just misguided and befuddled people. They've been carried away by their own disciplinary verbosity and snobbery like a very considerable part of the musical, artistic and literature professions. These professions have largely had their day. As self-conscious artforms, they've risen and fallen in bell-shape fashion between about 1000 and 1850. Huge quantities of music, art and literature will continue to be produced, of course, for all sorts of occasions and consumer fashions, and there'll be many a best-seller among them as they touch on something really sensitive in the public domain, but there'll be nothing new in a technical sense. All the great discoveries in their respective trades have already been discovered (and surprisingly few of them -- as in economics, see below). >I also find that web sites often take so much energy that >others don't converse much about their work. I don't even >give out my web site since I think it is doctrinaire and is >just plain unsuccessful. It just sits there like a lump with >a couple of innocuous graphics. Well, why don't you make it interesting? If it's got something to offer, people will find their way to it and news will also spread by word of mouth. But I agree about Web sites in the main. Most of the Internet is over-rated and most of it is a complete mess. Even now we haven't a decent indexing system by which we can make our way dependably to any destination. I don't think it will ever happen -- at least not for a very long time -- because sales of the PC are now topping out in mature societies and will be rapidly overtaken by the mobile phone in the next few years and, although mobilers will be using the Internet, the devices will be of an easy-to-use, programmable sort to be able to go to a small number of Web sites such as shopping for groceries, job vacancies, ticket buying, video films, share buying, and a few more specific uses, which is what the vast majority of the public want. And, talking of mobile phones -- which, unlike music, is a field where lots of develoments will occur in the coming years -- the evidence from the Scandinavian countries is that almost everybody will buy one (Sweden already has 93% adult coverage) and it's likely that most people will have several specialist ones (my own business is loss-making now because we sell only one score to each choir but is aiming towards the time when choral singers will have hand-held music readers into which they'll be able to download any music they want -- and then we'll be selling to individuals again). Ray might well ask me: "Well, if you think music has finished developing, what are you doing publishing music?". To which I reply: "Ah, but choral and community music will live on because our social instincts are far deeper than what passes for music today -- the snobberies and artificial social cachets of the concert hall or the opera house or the youthful fashions of open-air raves. We have become individualised so much in the course of this last half-century that there is bound to be a reversion to community -- of which choral singing will be a part. Actually (I think I'd better return to the main purpose of this List or else Sally or Arthur will tell me off), I think the mobile phone will probably do more for jobs than anything else. Forget recent economic theories (often self-contradictory), government policies and other panaceas. What will do more for jobs than anything else will be accessible databases of job vacancies. I'm tempted to go on to say that the main planks of economic theory have already been laid by Smith, Ricardo, etc (e.g. specialisation, comparative advantage, etc -- a very small number of radical discoveries just as in the arts). What's necessary now is getting rid of protective practices in education/skill training on the one hand, and the knowledge of job vacancies on the other. The mobile phone will take care of the latter, though the former, like trade protection generally, will still take generations to reform, I'm afraid. Keith > >Just a thought, > >Ray Evans Harrell > > >Christoph Reuss wrote: > >> > So I would say make more and better attachments! >> >> REH, no point in argueing about this: Sending attachments to a list >> violates the official Netiquette, is a waste of bandwidth and >> clutters up the harddisks of hundreds of users, many of which >> can't decode the attachment anyway and/or don't even have a >> clue how to locate/delete the clutter from their harddisk. >> >> If someone *needs* to visualize content, then put it on a website and >> send the URL to the list. >> >> Chris > > > > > ________________________________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________