I think we should get rid of all writing. With all of those spelling and grammar issues to contend with, I think writing is too hard and too error prone. Since I suck at writing, I can't imagine that anyone else finds it useful at all. We should move to pictures and video for everything. With technology being what it is, what's the point of words anymore?
I know it's not fashionable on Slashdot, but a Mac with Logic does everything you want to do. Logic even does notation reasonably well. I've used it to score string parts and it's fine. It isn't as good as Finale, but you can try it and see if it does what you want. It's $200 for Logic Pro X which pretty much gobbles up the difference between the cost of the mac and an equally equipped PC with Pro Tools. You'll still need IO, but that tends to not be terribly expensive. It also comes with boatloads of synths and samples, so you likely won't need to buy those (although I love everything that Native Instruments makes and highly recommend everything they make).
If you get more into the synthesis side of things, you can also check out Max/MSP. You can also check out PureData, if you want something open source. For your initial requirements, I think a mac running Logic Pro X is the best solution though, and could end up being the cheapest in an apples to apples comparison.
I use a mac with Ableton/MaxMSP live in a band setting and use Logic Pro X for recording anything multi-track where phase correlation matters (drums, live recordings, etc.). I use MOTU IO. I rarely have problems. The gear just works. I rarely spend time optimizing or fiddling with settings. I plug things in and it makes/records noise. I think those last four sentences are very important when making music.
If I sit down to record and get distracted by having to fuck with processes running in the background, or crackling and popping on my IO because my buffer settings aren't dialed in or because some errant process is causing things to hang momentarily every few minutes, that distracts me from making music. I love open source for a lot of things, but no one has really dialed in open source audio to the point where you're not constantly messing with it. Windows is actually the same way. Some people like that though. Some people don't mind spending time dialing things in, if it saves them some money. I'm not that guy though. I know that macs aren't immune to problems, but I have significantly fewer problems with background processes making my life difficult than I had with my windows boxes. Windows 8.1 might be better, I haven't tried it, but 8 had all the same irritating problems that 7 and XP had for me.
Anyway, that's my $0.02. I recommend a mac with Logic. It works great for me. Take lots of people's suggestions and see which ones align the most with what you're trying to do, and then run with it. Spend time making music and not worrying about your decision once you're running. There is an extraordinary amount of brilliant software out there. If you go with a PC and Reaper, you'll have more capability to make amazing music than was available even a few years ago, and it will be cheap. You can't really lose, regardless of the decision you make.
I think you have a big screen and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse hooked to an OS that sucks for those devices. I also think you have a bunch of software not written for those interfaces. But what do I know. Maybe it will be fine. Currently I don't like it. Maybe someone will do it in a way that makes it awesome.
Seriously. When you have a start button, you do the following:
move your mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen,
click it,
move your mouse to the app you want to open,
click it.
In Windows 8 it works like this:
move your mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen,
click it,
move your mouse to the app you want to open,
click it.
It's the exact same. I swear the people complaining about this stuff aren't actually using it. I always feel like I'm using a different product than the one people are reviewing.
I was in Edmonton earlier this year for work. I was talking music with some guys that lived there and they hadn't heard of spotify. I went to show it to them an lo-and-behold it didn't work in Canada. I don't know if it was just spotify, but perhaps their sales are high because of a lack of easy alternatives. It would be interesting to know if Canada had more draconian laws against file sharing and streaming, or if it is actually something cultural.
I had a basement flood. It filled up about 3 feet deep because the drain plug in the basement of the house I was renting clogged while it was flooding. My entire studio was in the basement. I had a laptop on the floor, my computer, a bunch of Mackie SRM450 speakers, a mackie mixer, a bunch of guitar pedals. All of it was under water. After getting all the water out of the basement, tearing out the drywall, removing the carpet and dehumidifying everything in less than 72 hours I start looking at my electronics. I dismantled things just enough that air could get in and let them sit in the room for a week with the dehumidifier expecting the worst. At the end of the week I went and started turning stuff on. In the end I had to buy a new CMOS batter for my motherboard on my desktop PC. Literally every other thing (well over 30 various plugged-in-during-the-flood electronic devices) had no problems. I was expecting to have to get my insurance company involved but was stoked to find that even the cones on the mackie speakers were fine. I honestly think that in most cases you're inviting problems by trying to clean things out. Your electronics are not going to grow mold if you run an industrial dehumidifier for a week. If the water was filthy then it will be a different story, but I would say that if the boards look clean then don't put anything else on them. That's just my $.02.
It's really odd that this just came up because I just revisited this very question. I have been using Eclipse with PyDev on Windows for about a year and generally like it. Eclipse can be a bit of a bear depending on your hardware and PyDev's auto-completion can be spot on sometimes and utterly useless others; however, generally it runs pretty well. I haven't had any stability issues at all with it.
That being said, the more I use python, the fewer features I need in an IDE for some reason. One feature I really do like having though is reliable code-completion when I am writing code for wxpython. Wing is perfect in that regard. I have just recently switched from PyDev on Eclipse to Wing and am very happy with it because of code-completion and debugging. Wing's debugger and auto-completion features kick the crap out of everything.
If you're doing open source work and want the professional version it is completely free. If you want the pro version for non-free software development it costs about $150. It's worth every penny if you want very accurate code completion. It also has emacs key bindings if you want them. I rarely have to use a mouse because they are so good. The debugger is pretty good too. I just started doing unit-testing so I am not experienced enough to have an opinion on it, but wing supports that too.
My only complaint about Wing is the lack of a regex editor; however, I don't do a lot of regex so when I need one I just use regex buddy.
Ultimately it comes down to what feature you need. Try them all out and pick the one that doesn't get in your way. If things work for you like they have for me, you may find that the editor generally doesn't matter other than for the handful of features you actually use regularly.
It's true. I had my laptop dual booting Linux for the last year with the idea that I would use windows less and less as I found open source equivalents of the software I used. What happened is that my company uses Exchange and I could never get weaned from it. I migrated almost every other program that I use and even started using python to automate anything that I had to do more than once. It was great, except I had to run windows in a VM which was a processor hog and just generally clunky feeling. I tried every email program out there and they all suck when it comes to exchange. Open Office is clunky. It's like a bad copy of office. Instead of trying to do something innovative they've decided to make a crappy copy of the same bloated software and I can't get behind that. I tried the exchange email client but it is crippled in Firefox (no search). I basically ended up doing all email and document work in windows in a slow VM, and everything else in Ubuntu.
If you don't do pro-audio or pro-video and you work in a place that doesn't have exchange then I think the switch to Linux could be easy, but for me I can't get around the lack of a decent exchange client. What has ended up happening is I have migrated all of the free software over to windows that I liked. I just have to wait for Amarok 2 to come out for XP and I will be set. Someday maybe the applications will be what ultimately gets Linux into the mainstream as far as a desktop OSs go. Until someone tackles the exchange beast and makes open office have a less early 90s feel to it or creates different software entirely I think there will be a lot of people that decide it's just easier to run XP.
I think the community has made a lot of progress as far as usability. It will never be good enough for some people; however, for most people it is fine now. The problem is that there is no reason to go through the discomfort of change. There is no app worth dumping windows for right now for most people. And for the people that are willing to go through some discomfort, there is no solution for the exchange problem. What's the point of moving to Linux to do the same thing with more effort and goofy named apps? Where is the innovation that would draw people to Linux? Where are the apps that kick ass instead of pretend to be windows apps? There are a few, but none of them have been able to draw people over. The OS is getting easy enough to use and pretty enough to hold its own. Now the apps need to get there. Until that happens I think Linux is going to be forever playing catchup.
Okay, enough with the drama. First of all, my bird would never be in a rain forest because he is Australian. Second of all, I am pretty sure that my bird would argue with you about how cruel his existence is if he could talk.
He is fully flighted. I take him outside with me all the time. He pretty much has free reign of the house when I am home. When I am not home he has to play all day in his gym and listen to the radio. He is only in a cage to sleep which I think he would prefer to being hunted 24/7. He was not wild caught so all of the things you're complaining about are non-applicable. Rather than saying no one should have birds as pets, perhaps you should say that people should do their homework before they buy animals to make sure things are on the up and up. The birth of my bird didn't affect Africa or Australia any more than my birth is affected Switzerland or England.
It is tragic that bad things happen. It is more tragic when people over-react to those bad things and tromp all over things that make people happy.
This entire thread is strange to me. I am a musician that funds my hobby by working in computers. I am by no means a master programmer or even terribly proficient. I tend to take on personal projects that need to be completed but that real programmers don't have time to do. I tend to do them with whatever tool seems to be the easiest to do it with. I don't have a CS degree. I don't know a lot of theory; however, every time I take a little project on it gives me a little bit of experience (and often a little piece of re-usable code) and I get better and better at writing clean, useful, and reusable code.
This thread is strange to me because so many people on here are telling this guy what not to do as if there is a right or wrong way to learn to program instead of offering suggestions. The way I learn is not going to get an operating system written; however, for every one of me there is some guy out there who wants to write his own operating system and is interested in what I find tedious. I guess if I were to compare it to something I would compare it to songwriting. What is the best way to write a song? Some people write songs following a formula or self-imposed or stylistic goal. Some people learn a ton of theory and then try to find new and exciting ways to execute it. Some people write some words about how they hate their girlfriend and then bash a guitar so they can get a new girlfriend with more enhanced breasts. All of them are valid and all of them accomplish exactly what was intended [some with more assistance from alcohol than others]. The trick is in identifying what you want to accomplish and then finding proper motivation to achieve whatever it is you set as a goal.
Believe it or not, not everyone in the world is the same. Different people want to do different things. What is wrong for one guy is bomb for another. Bagging on languages and platforms is just as stupid as saying Steve Vai is a better guitar player than Hendrix because he's more precise or because he can read music and transcribe insanely complex Zappa songs for guitar. If you ask a different person they'll tell you that Vai has no soul and Hendrix is the definition of it. Just because I think Steve Vai sounds like someone playing scales really fast doesn't mean it is wrong; it just means that I don't get it. It doesn't inspire me. If someone's idea of a kick ass time involves spending months learning the deep inner workings of how code is executed on a computer and accomplishes it by learning how to write a bunch of assembly which they then give away for free, more power to them. If someone else just wants to turn a bunch of xmls generated by some time tracking software into a csv formatted file that their stupid corporate oracle itime software can ingest so they don't have to duplicate work every friday before they go home to play rock music in their band, that's a good time too... for at least one guy I know. Talking smack on either one, however though provoking it may end up being, is usually counter-productive.
Ghostunit said a few things I disagree with because I don't think telling people what not to do is very useful in this case. What he said at the end though is money. Find something interesting and you won't be able to help but get better as you work on it. The instant you get it done you'll have thought of 10 ways to do it better or faster and those lessons will apply to the feature creep that your little project will undoubtedly get after your coworkers see what you've done and ask you to bolt stuff onto it. You'll do that and build an entirely useful tool which your company will then own because of an agreement you signed when you got hired. They will sell it for millions and then give you a raise that doesn't keep up with inflation. Regardless, you'll get better at writing code which is the point of this whole spiel. If that doesn't sound appealing to you, you can try out some of the other suggestions. You can learn to write something in assembly or lisp if that's what turn
Slashdot Mirror
Mine in Dallas have had 4 approximately 15 minute outages since Christmas. It's a bummer.
That is an important distinction. I agree.
You mean geeks think they're better than everyone? I can't believe it. This figuratively blows my mind.
I think we should get rid of all writing. With all of those spelling and grammar issues to contend with, I think writing is too hard and too error prone. Since I suck at writing, I can't imagine that anyone else finds it useful at all. We should move to pictures and video for everything. With technology being what it is, what's the point of words anymore?
-Suck my DIckens
I know it's not fashionable on Slashdot, but a Mac with Logic does everything you want to do. Logic even does notation reasonably well. I've used it to score string parts and it's fine. It isn't as good as Finale, but you can try it and see if it does what you want. It's $200 for Logic Pro X which pretty much gobbles up the difference between the cost of the mac and an equally equipped PC with Pro Tools. You'll still need IO, but that tends to not be terribly expensive. It also comes with boatloads of synths and samples, so you likely won't need to buy those (although I love everything that Native Instruments makes and highly recommend everything they make).
If you get more into the synthesis side of things, you can also check out Max/MSP. You can also check out PureData, if you want something open source. For your initial requirements, I think a mac running Logic Pro X is the best solution though, and could end up being the cheapest in an apples to apples comparison.
I use a mac with Ableton/MaxMSP live in a band setting and use Logic Pro X for recording anything multi-track where phase correlation matters (drums, live recordings, etc.). I use MOTU IO. I rarely have problems. The gear just works. I rarely spend time optimizing or fiddling with settings. I plug things in and it makes/records noise. I think those last four sentences are very important when making music.
If I sit down to record and get distracted by having to fuck with processes running in the background, or crackling and popping on my IO because my buffer settings aren't dialed in or because some errant process is causing things to hang momentarily every few minutes, that distracts me from making music. I love open source for a lot of things, but no one has really dialed in open source audio to the point where you're not constantly messing with it. Windows is actually the same way. Some people like that though. Some people don't mind spending time dialing things in, if it saves them some money. I'm not that guy though. I know that macs aren't immune to problems, but I have significantly fewer problems with background processes making my life difficult than I had with my windows boxes. Windows 8.1 might be better, I haven't tried it, but 8 had all the same irritating problems that 7 and XP had for me.
Anyway, that's my $0.02. I recommend a mac with Logic. It works great for me. Take lots of people's suggestions and see which ones align the most with what you're trying to do, and then run with it. Spend time making music and not worrying about your decision once you're running. There is an extraordinary amount of brilliant software out there. If you go with a PC and Reaper, you'll have more capability to make amazing music than was available even a few years ago, and it will be cheap. You can't really lose, regardless of the decision you make.
Yea, you're right. I have a laptop I'm looking to trade. Let the consuming begin!
I think you have a big screen and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse hooked to an OS that sucks for those devices. I also think you have a bunch of software not written for those interfaces. But what do I know. Maybe it will be fine. Currently I don't like it. Maybe someone will do it in a way that makes it awesome.
Yep, phones are for consuming things, and in a pinch, they can kind of limp along at creating things. Computers are for creating.
What exactly was taken away? The start button?
Seriously. When you have a start button, you do the following:
move your mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen,
click it,
move your mouse to the app you want to open,
click it.
In Windows 8 it works like this:
move your mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen,
click it,
move your mouse to the app you want to open,
click it.
It's the exact same. I swear the people complaining about this stuff aren't actually using it. I always feel like I'm using a different product than the one people are reviewing.
I was in Edmonton earlier this year for work. I was talking music with some guys that lived there and they hadn't heard of spotify. I went to show it to them an lo-and-behold it didn't work in Canada. I don't know if it was just spotify, but perhaps their sales are high because of a lack of easy alternatives. It would be interesting to know if Canada had more draconian laws against file sharing and streaming, or if it is actually something cultural.
I had a basement flood. It filled up about 3 feet deep because the drain plug in the basement of the house I was renting clogged while it was flooding. My entire studio was in the basement. I had a laptop on the floor, my computer, a bunch of Mackie SRM450 speakers, a mackie mixer, a bunch of guitar pedals. All of it was under water. After getting all the water out of the basement, tearing out the drywall, removing the carpet and dehumidifying everything in less than 72 hours I start looking at my electronics. I dismantled things just enough that air could get in and let them sit in the room for a week with the dehumidifier expecting the worst. At the end of the week I went and started turning stuff on. In the end I had to buy a new CMOS batter for my motherboard on my desktop PC. Literally every other thing (well over 30 various plugged-in-during-the-flood electronic devices) had no problems. I was expecting to have to get my insurance company involved but was stoked to find that even the cones on the mackie speakers were fine. I honestly think that in most cases you're inviting problems by trying to clean things out. Your electronics are not going to grow mold if you run an industrial dehumidifier for a week. If the water was filthy then it will be a different story, but I would say that if the boards look clean then don't put anything else on them. That's just my $.02.
Have you developed on it? It looks good but actionscript is a nightmare if you're used to any language other than javascript.
Oh man, It has been a while but that made me laugh out loud. Awesome.
It's really odd that this just came up because I just revisited this very question. I have been using Eclipse with PyDev on Windows for about a year and generally like it. Eclipse can be a bit of a bear depending on your hardware and PyDev's auto-completion can be spot on sometimes and utterly useless others; however, generally it runs pretty well. I haven't had any stability issues at all with it. That being said, the more I use python, the fewer features I need in an IDE for some reason. One feature I really do like having though is reliable code-completion when I am writing code for wxpython. Wing is perfect in that regard. I have just recently switched from PyDev on Eclipse to Wing and am very happy with it because of code-completion and debugging. Wing's debugger and auto-completion features kick the crap out of everything. If you're doing open source work and want the professional version it is completely free. If you want the pro version for non-free software development it costs about $150. It's worth every penny if you want very accurate code completion. It also has emacs key bindings if you want them. I rarely have to use a mouse because they are so good. The debugger is pretty good too. I just started doing unit-testing so I am not experienced enough to have an opinion on it, but wing supports that too. My only complaint about Wing is the lack of a regex editor; however, I don't do a lot of regex so when I need one I just use regex buddy. Ultimately it comes down to what feature you need. Try them all out and pick the one that doesn't get in your way. If things work for you like they have for me, you may find that the editor generally doesn't matter other than for the handful of features you actually use regularly.
It's true. I had my laptop dual booting Linux for the last year with the idea that I would use windows less and less as I found open source equivalents of the software I used. What happened is that my company uses Exchange and I could never get weaned from it. I migrated almost every other program that I use and even started using python to automate anything that I had to do more than once. It was great, except I had to run windows in a VM which was a processor hog and just generally clunky feeling. I tried every email program out there and they all suck when it comes to exchange. Open Office is clunky. It's like a bad copy of office. Instead of trying to do something innovative they've decided to make a crappy copy of the same bloated software and I can't get behind that. I tried the exchange email client but it is crippled in Firefox (no search). I basically ended up doing all email and document work in windows in a slow VM, and everything else in Ubuntu.
If you don't do pro-audio or pro-video and you work in a place that doesn't have exchange then I think the switch to Linux could be easy, but for me I can't get around the lack of a decent exchange client. What has ended up happening is I have migrated all of the free software over to windows that I liked. I just have to wait for Amarok 2 to come out for XP and I will be set. Someday maybe the applications will be what ultimately gets Linux into the mainstream as far as a desktop OSs go. Until someone tackles the exchange beast and makes open office have a less early 90s feel to it or creates different software entirely I think there will be a lot of people that decide it's just easier to run XP.
I think the community has made a lot of progress as far as usability. It will never be good enough for some people; however, for most people it is fine now. The problem is that there is no reason to go through the discomfort of change. There is no app worth dumping windows for right now for most people. And for the people that are willing to go through some discomfort, there is no solution for the exchange problem. What's the point of moving to Linux to do the same thing with more effort and goofy named apps? Where is the innovation that would draw people to Linux? Where are the apps that kick ass instead of pretend to be windows apps? There are a few, but none of them have been able to draw people over. The OS is getting easy enough to use and pretty enough to hold its own. Now the apps need to get there. Until that happens I think Linux is going to be forever playing catchup.
Okay, enough with the drama. First of all, my bird would never be in a rain forest because he is Australian. Second of all, I am pretty sure that my bird would argue with you about how cruel his existence is if he could talk.
He is fully flighted. I take him outside with me all the time. He pretty much has free reign of the house when I am home. When I am not home he has to play all day in his gym and listen to the radio. He is only in a cage to sleep which I think he would prefer to being hunted 24/7. He was not wild caught so all of the things you're complaining about are non-applicable. Rather than saying no one should have birds as pets, perhaps you should say that people should do their homework before they buy animals to make sure things are on the up and up. The birth of my bird didn't affect Africa or Australia any more than my birth is affected Switzerland or England.
It is tragic that bad things happen. It is more tragic when people over-react to those bad things and tromp all over things that make people happy.
This entire thread is strange to me. I am a musician that funds my hobby by working in computers. I am by no means a master programmer or even terribly proficient. I tend to take on personal projects that need to be completed but that real programmers don't have time to do. I tend to do them with whatever tool seems to be the easiest to do it with. I don't have a CS degree. I don't know a lot of theory; however, every time I take a little project on it gives me a little bit of experience (and often a little piece of re-usable code) and I get better and better at writing clean, useful, and reusable code.
This thread is strange to me because so many people on here are telling this guy what not to do as if there is a right or wrong way to learn to program instead of offering suggestions. The way I learn is not going to get an operating system written; however, for every one of me there is some guy out there who wants to write his own operating system and is interested in what I find tedious. I guess if I were to compare it to something I would compare it to songwriting. What is the best way to write a song? Some people write songs following a formula or self-imposed or stylistic goal. Some people learn a ton of theory and then try to find new and exciting ways to execute it. Some people write some words about how they hate their girlfriend and then bash a guitar so they can get a new girlfriend with more enhanced breasts. All of them are valid and all of them accomplish exactly what was intended [some with more assistance from alcohol than others]. The trick is in identifying what you want to accomplish and then finding proper motivation to achieve whatever it is you set as a goal.
Believe it or not, not everyone in the world is the same. Different people want to do different things. What is wrong for one guy is bomb for another. Bagging on languages and platforms is just as stupid as saying Steve Vai is a better guitar player than Hendrix because he's more precise or because he can read music and transcribe insanely complex Zappa songs for guitar. If you ask a different person they'll tell you that Vai has no soul and Hendrix is the definition of it. Just because I think Steve Vai sounds like someone playing scales really fast doesn't mean it is wrong; it just means that I don't get it. It doesn't inspire me. If someone's idea of a kick ass time involves spending months learning the deep inner workings of how code is executed on a computer and accomplishes it by learning how to write a bunch of assembly which they then give away for free, more power to them. If someone else just wants to turn a bunch of xmls generated by some time tracking software into a csv formatted file that their stupid corporate oracle itime software can ingest so they don't have to duplicate work every friday before they go home to play rock music in their band, that's a good time too... for at least one guy I know. Talking smack on either one, however though provoking it may end up being, is usually counter-productive.
Ghostunit said a few things I disagree with because I don't think telling people what not to do is very useful in this case. What he said at the end though is money. Find something interesting and you won't be able to help but get better as you work on it. The instant you get it done you'll have thought of 10 ways to do it better or faster and those lessons will apply to the feature creep that your little project will undoubtedly get after your coworkers see what you've done and ask you to bolt stuff onto it. You'll do that and build an entirely useful tool which your company will then own because of an agreement you signed when you got hired. They will sell it for millions and then give you a raise that doesn't keep up with inflation. Regardless, you'll get better at writing code which is the point of this whole spiel. If that doesn't sound appealing to you, you can try out some of the other suggestions. You can learn to write something in assembly or lisp if that's what turn