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I agree with the grandparent post that the linked article is more of a blog comment than a review. In sum, I think he probably got it as a "Microsoft rip-off of Photoshop" not to be taken seriously.

Instead, I suggest you look at the following list. They are more professional and in-depth reviews of Microsoft Expression (formerly Creature House Expression - the basis of Acrylic) by various magazines online:

• Graphics Unleashed
• All 'Bout Computers
• creativepro.com
• Designer-info
• Creative Mac
• Applelinks
• MacWorld
• About.com

Notice that Mac version has always been available except for this Beta Acrylic release. So I bet Expression was designed to appeal to artists among the Mac community to begin with.

Expression has made use of a unique technology called Skeletal Stroke (the review by creative.com has some explanation), which adds substance & complexity of raster graphics along vector paths. So I believe this vector drawing & painting package, while not as popular as Adobe Illustrator, has always been targetting a niche market with its own appeal.

In fact, it can produce some of the amazing effect found in Chinese water painting and other fine art drawing handily, even easier than you can do with Illustrator. The downside is a steeper learning curve to tap the full power of this unique & different app.

You can find more tutorials & resources on Expression at Wikipedia

Here's one resource, Constructing Isometric Grid Paper, A Computer Aid, but you can buy it at places that sell engineering drawing type supplies. Or at least you used to be able to. I would start at the bottom in the middle and darken in the edges to show which blocks are to be filled in. One problem with this is that you are kind of limited in complexity. If it's too complicated it will be tough to tell what is going on. Even if its pretty simple there are still going to be points at which clues overlap, and that is going to make it hard to understand. I like the idea that someone else had of using hex paper, I think that would be easier to do.

What is the best software to use to create such a beast on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems?

For audio CDs, SoundForge formerly of Sonic Foundry, and now owned by Sony Pictures seems to be the industry favorite, and is generally considered the best multi-track audio sequencer around. Here is a review. You will also need Roxio or some other CD burning software to create the CD.

And conversely, has anyone used any of the music software on these platforms to actually analyze the contents of commercial subliminal CDs?

For that, you need some sampling software and some oscilloscope software. Talk to the DJ at your local club (the kind who has two decks and a microphone and a laptop). Your local DJ should be able to sample and analyze the CD for you, although it's not all that usefull... Audio signals layers get flattened to a single layer when burned to a CD, and it's difficult to separate the layers afterwords. That being said, we often times just used WinAmp to analyze audio signals. When analyzing audio spectrum, we would often run it through a video oscilloscope... Personally, I like to use G-Force as it's easy on the eyes and can analyze amplitude, frequency, and phase, at the same time. There are some software packages which people have written to try to seperate a flattened audio feed into seperate channels, although they usually don't work well (i.e. most of them are crap).

One common method of creating a "hidden message" is to write a short track and layer it inside the base by decreasing it's frequency and putting it below normal speaking range, down in the base range, with the drum beat. You can also take a message and put a white-noise mask over it, although signal loss is obviously a problem with that method. Obviously, you can also distort a message's temporal length, and make it veeerrrryyy sssllllloooowwww or vry fst. And you can also phase shift it, although that gets kinda weird.

A really good method for creating a good subliminal message, however, is to use symbolic messaging rather than embedded messaging. Basically, you separate your message into "chunks", and divide the chunks between different layers. As a somewhat silly example, which illustrates how this works, imagine that my subliminal message was "Impeach Bush". I would then chunk the message into "Impeach" and "Bush" obviously... Then I would sample two music clips, such as some dude saying the words "bush & beaver" and some chick singing the words "I'm just a wild peach". I'd loop the guy's sample to create one of those kinda annoying euro dance beats, and use the chick's sample as part of the refrain. If the refrain was sung three times throughout the song, and the last line to the refrain was "I'm just a wild peach", there would be three subliminal messages in the song, as the words transitioned from the girl saying "wild peach" to the guy saying "bush and beaver"... With the end effect of three subliminal messages in the CD approximating the impression "Impeach Bush".

By the way, there are a lot of twits on the slashdot forum today who are posting stuff like "subliminal messages are bullshit" and "subliminal messages don't work". I used to work at the National Opinion Research Center which is a demographics research center, and monitored things like commercials and subliminal messages. That was part of my job. Granted, we tended to concentrate on visual feeds, rather than auditory feeds. However, I can guarantee you that subliminal messages are extinsively used in communications. Often times, people create a subliminal message without even realizing it. Other times, they are sneakier and craft

Check out the dino. Now I ask you, doesn't that pattern look just like ones you've seen in hobby shops? Which means whoever made this thing has *pirated* a *physical object*! This baby is a copy machine for tangible objects - if they happen to be thin and flat.

that was neat. I was shocked by the pic of the glass. up until then, I was thinking of flat surfaces.

You are evil. Linking to a site that provides free samples.

Yes, I'm evil too.

or view images of what it can do Here.
-Seriv

In the computer world, in the 1960s the most widely available output device was a "line printer". This was a printer which printed up to 132 characters on each line of 11x17 paper. The printer could be told to stay on the same line, so text could be printer over other previously printed text. There were a large number of images developed to be printed out, including ones which were printed in several columns which had to be joined side-to-side (such as an image of a jet flying over the Golden Gate bridge). Both simple printing and overprinting were used. Here is an example circa 1973; it was such a popular technique that even self-portraits were done with it.

There were programs available for creating "printer art". You'd give the program a two-dimensional matrix of integers with the gray scale value desired for each pixel. The programs simply translated the gray scale numbers to the character (or characters) used for the nearest shade of gray. The programs were particularly convenient if you were one of the few people with some sort of image scanning device.

When ASCII became popular, with Teletypes and 72-80 character timesharing terminals becoming common, the same technology was used there. Some artists preferred to (or didn't know about the programs) manually create the art with text editors (or tools like a 1987 program for creating printer art). Some of the same images appeared on terminals.

Obviously, text characters were used simply for their gray-scale pixel value. The same technology can be used for images, by selecting component images based on brightness and color values.

There are now many ASCII Art sites on the Web. This Conversion Programs information is from this ASCII Art FAQ. An online example of a conversion program is GIF2TXT, which converts any online image -- try giving it that Slashdot logo at the upper left of this page. If you don't get enough ASCII Art links here, try the ASCII Art WebRing.