Well, 85% of the time, it will be red. The rest of the time, it's sort of a rust color as we pull it out of the river because you were talking on the cell phone and missed the "bridge out" sign.
I've played some of Cope's software's impersonations of Mozart, IIRC. My memory of it was that although it was reminiscent of Mozart in many ways, it didn't have good melodic flow the way a human-composed piece would. I kind of felt the same way about the samples in the article, though they're definitely a big step forward.
I'll be impressed when software can imitate Copland or Leonard Bernstein. And I don't mean imitating one style of their works, I mean the entire body of it, spanning a broad gamut of musical styles and feels, often integrating seemingly disparate styles in ways that are musically unique and interesting.
P.S. I found it rather amusing to see Bartok in your list. From my memory of those pieces, that's the sort of thing that a good programmer could whip out in about an hour. You just generate a fairly simple, rhythmically repetitive left hand, add a rhythmically simple right hand using a pseudorandom number generator to generate the melodic line, limiting jumps to the range of about an octave at any given time and limiting the number of repeated jumps in any given direction so that it falls within a fixed range, force the result into some semblance of a musical form, and litter both hands with lots of cluster chords. It's also remarkably similar to what you get when you sit two two-year-olds in front of the piano, just with a better sense of rhythm.:-D
P.P.S. Am I the only one whose mind went immediately to a recent Microsoft product ad when I read this headline?
It astonishes me that anyone still uses Network Solutions. Their extensive list of blocks for transferring domain services (read: anytime you'd actually want to, you're prevented) is mind-boggling.
Agreed. It astonishes me even more, however, that an organization like this would do so, and doubly so that anyone in their right minds doing anything more than a personal vanity site would use the same provider for both hosting and domain name registration. That's just asking for a hard-to-fix DMCA shutdown of the site, loss of the site due to the ISP going bankrupt, loss of the domain due to any number of billing disagreements with the ISP that are unrelated to the domain name registration, etc.
AFAIK, the DMCA does *not* provide for locking the domain registration of a claimed-infringing site, only providing for the takedown of the content. However, if your ISP decides it is easier to kill your DNS and lock the domain to prevent transferring it than to muck with your server account, you're stuck. Why? Because you are using the same provider for hosting and (massively overpriced) domain name registration. Don't DO that.
If I were one of these folks, I'd register my domain in a neutral country. For example, you can register.com domains with Gandi.net in France or with NameForName in Russia, or... well, here's a list of ICANN-accredited registrars, most of which support the.com registry. Find one in a country that has as few ACTA-like agreements with the U.S. as possible. Even with the exchange rates as bad as they are, those two I mentioned still charge less than half what NetSol charges for a domain name, with the added security of making it much harder to attack the domain itself with a mere DMCA takedown notice.
A significant percentage of ear infections do result in the eustachian tubes being blocked, whether due to muscles or due to swelling. Most people don't even realize they have an ear infection until this occurs, as that's what causes the pressure and throbbing that are characteristic of an ear infection. Without that, it's just a dull ache that most people would typically ignore or blame on a sore muscle. Therefore, any treatment that results in massaging the right parts of your neck will almost invariably relieve symptoms of an ear infection if the infection is severe enough. And to some extent, relieving the pressure will allow the ear to be flushed out (that's why the fluid is there), which may eventually result in the infection going away on its own (or it may not).
It's not at all the same as claiming homeopathy works because a handful of people are really dehydrated. Chiropractors don't claim that massage helps when it's really the extra heat from their fingertips that helps.... Proper massage will frequently help with an ear infection. It will not always cure it nor will the benefits always be long-lasting. The end result depends on a lot of variables, of which the closed-up eustachian tubes are only one. It's more like your doctor telling you to drink lots of fluids and get lots of rest. It won't cure the cold, but it will help to reduce its duration and reduce the risk of complications such as sinus infections.
Well, so some degree, ear infections can be caused by muscle tension around the eustachian tubes not allowing the ear to drain properly, so to the extent that this is the case, chiropractic medicine can help (as can a good massage therapist without cracking your spine). This is probably not by any stretch of the imagination the majority of ear infections, of course.
I suspect that a lot of the things that many people suspect are quackery do, in fact, actually prove beneficial *in some cases*, depending on the underlying root cause. The problem comes when somebody overgeneralizes and distorts this to say that he/she can, as you put it, cure ear infections by twisting your spine. Occasionally, yes, but usually not.
I've never seen a single commercial application that tried to scribble libraries outside of the app bundle or "/Library/Application Support/MyApplication" or "$HOME/Library/Application Support/MyApplication". I can think of several dozen examples off the top of my head where I've seen such dependency problems, but every single one of them was an app ported (badly) to Mac OS X from Linux or other UN*X OSes. Basically, it's the result of trying to hack together a quick port without really taking the time to learn how to write software on the platform, and it's a sign of a really lousy application that generally won't get very far.
Feel free to disagree, but please provide a list of commercial apps that misbehave in ways that cause these dependency problems you're complaining about. You might find one or two really obscure ones, but such problems are certainly exceptionally rare. Even the Mac developers who I consider to be bordering on inept don't make the sorts of mistakes you're describing, at least as far as I've seen.....
Only if Heisenberg was right. Many, many things in science have been believed to be absolute truths but were later proven to be wrong as new technologies became available.
With Windows, their major OS transition happened only about a year after the first version of Photoshop for Windows came out. It was still in its infancy, so there wasn't a lot of cruft code to port to the new NT core. They've basically been able to get away without lots of huge changes since then because the OS is so fundamentally similar....
Adobe released the first Mac OS X version of Photoshop when the code base was about twelve years old. When they transitioned the code, they hacked and kludged things. For example, judging from a quick "NM" on CS3, huge chunks of their code depends on the crufty FSSpec family of APIs. Those were not officially deprecated back in 2005 (because there were a handful of edge cases that could only be accomplished with FSSpec), but the API that replaced them, FSRef, has been available since System 7 and has been strongly recommended over FSSpec since... well, since 1991 or so.
Most Mac developers had fully converted their code to FSRef APIs in the mid-to-late 1990s because they tend to give a *much* better experience for the user. And now, nearly two decades after the FSRef came out, more than a decade after most other apps on the platform transitioned to the new APIs, Adobe is still clinging to the ancient past.
I suspect Photoshop will need a fairly major rewrite to bring it up to modern standards; Adobe has rested on their laurels for *decades*, not modernizing or fixing any aspect of their software until something breaks severely. So as for fault, I'd say it's almost completely Adobe's fault for being one of only a handful of developers who still use crappy, ancient, pre-1991 APIs.
Nowadays every consumer electronics company either wants to nickle-and-dime you with "insurance", or doesn't care for the expense and offers as little as a 30 day warranty.
IIRC, California law requires that all consumer products costing more than a few bucks have a minimum of a 90 day warranty. I don't remember the exact dollar amount (maybe $100), and I can't seem to find the relevant law, but I remember reading it at some point in the past. There's also a minimum 60-day "fitness for the intended purpose" implied warranty in California. A 30 day warranty is almost certainly violating laws in California, and probably in several other states.
If these are Macs, then I can state with a fair degree of certainty that it is NOT possible to spy on people without their knowledge. A few days after they started shipping cameras in Mac laptops, I actually had a conversation on this subject with some people familiar with the camera hardware in question.
As shipped, the green light beside the camera turns on as soon as the camera is activated, and at the time, I was told that there is no way to disable it in software even by writing custom drivers. You would actually have to flash the camera with new firmware, and I'm not even sure if you could do it even then. You'd probably have to physically disable the light.
I think the reason the author is mad is that he/sbe jumps to the incorrect assumption that Adobe designed the PSD file format. Rather more likely, it is a half-assed dump of a bunch of internal data structures in native Mac byte order and structure packing, with shittons of hacks wrapped around it to make it load on x86 and other little endian architectures, shittons of additional hacks to force the packing to remain the same in Mac OS X, etc. It's not a "designed" file format so much as an example of what happens when a bunch of code monkeys fling data feces at a wall at maximum velocity and let it stick where it wants to. With that perspective, all of the inconsistencies noted in that comment suddenly make perfect sense.
My favorite quote is the checkin message, which pretty much says everything:
Photoshop loader is DONE for now, fuck you Adobe
My thoughts exactly. Bear in mind that if the file format (the most exposed, most critical piece of code in any application) sucks that badly, the rest of the application code is probably worse. Terrifying, really, particularly when you realize that this HFSX-incompatible piece of buggy-DRM-encumbered dingo turd costs $1,000.
Apple and Adobe are at odds because Adobe seems completely unwilling to do the slightest bit of work to keep their software working reliably in Mac OS X. As I understand it, the entire Carbon environment was basically an effort to placate Adobe because they balked at porting to Cocoa. And Flash? I don't know the statistics, but nearly every Safari crash I've ever seen can be pinned on Flash. For a while there, I was seeing better than one a week. Every single one of those crashes is a likely security hole. Personally, I would much rather have Silverlight on my iPhone than Flash....
The Creative Suite is particularly appalling. They've made it an official policy not to allow installation on case-sensitive HFS+. Case-sensitive HFS+ was introduced in Panther (10.3) back in in 2003. So here we are almost seven years later, and apparently that still isn't enough time for Adobe to spend eight or ten engineer hours to fix these bugs. Let me state that again. It takes less than an engineer day to run a handful of scripts, determine what filenames in your project are wrong, and fix them, even for a huge project like Photoshop. There's absolutely no plausible excuse for Adobe to still have this problem in CS4 except for complete and total apathy towards their Mac OS X customers.
Adobe isn't lazy. Adobe is flat out incompetent. As such, I've stopped buying their software. I'll consider buying an update when I can install it without wasting three days of my time doing horrible hacks just to get it to install and launch. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend a pissant company like Adobe dictate my volume format, and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars on another upgrade only to be told by their tech support that I can't install unless I reformat my hard drive and reinstall everything. Fuck you, Adobe. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. You aren't as important as you seem to think you are.
As far as I'm concerned, the best thing Apple could do is to buy Adobe, fire the entire development team, and hire three engineers to rewrite the Mac port of Photoshop over the next year and kill Flash entirely.
Are you sure? I thought I read somewhere that Adobe outsourced much of their engineering to India several years ago.... Maybe it was just tech support. *shrugs*
Not correct. The beachballing is not caused by a bug in Mac OS X (usually). The beachball indicates that the foreground application is not responding to events. About 99.999% of beachballs are caused by an application bug---specifically, the application doing too much work or blocking for too long on its main application thread and not pulling events off the event queue in a timely manner.
If the machine is unresponsive, it indicates that some critical daemon like coreservicesd is wedged, crashed, etc. and is thus causing all applications' main program loops to hang and not respond to events. Usually, however, this is not the case, and clicking to other applications results in normal behavior. Oh, and the other thing that can cause beachballs and general system unresponsiveness is an application being a pig and eating all the available RAM, causing other apps to get paged out to disk to make room. You can tell if that's what's happening because your hard drive sounds like raindrops being fired out at 1000 MPH at a sheet of aluminum foil....
Slashdot Mirror
Well, 85% of the time, it will be red. The rest of the time, it's sort of a rust color as we pull it out of the river because you were talking on the cell phone and missed the "bridge out" sign.
Am I close?
Agreed.
I've played some of Cope's software's impersonations of Mozart, IIRC. My memory of it was that although it was reminiscent of Mozart in many ways, it didn't have good melodic flow the way a human-composed piece would. I kind of felt the same way about the samples in the article, though they're definitely a big step forward.
I'll be impressed when software can imitate Copland or Leonard Bernstein. And I don't mean imitating one style of their works, I mean the entire body of it, spanning a broad gamut of musical styles and feels, often integrating seemingly disparate styles in ways that are musically unique and interesting.
P.S. I found it rather amusing to see Bartok in your list. From my memory of those pieces, that's the sort of thing that a good programmer could whip out in about an hour. You just generate a fairly simple, rhythmically repetitive left hand, add a rhythmically simple right hand using a pseudorandom number generator to generate the melodic line, limiting jumps to the range of about an octave at any given time and limiting the number of repeated jumps in any given direction so that it falls within a fixed range, force the result into some semblance of a musical form, and litter both hands with lots of cluster chords. It's also remarkably similar to what you get when you sit two two-year-olds in front of the piano, just with a better sense of rhythm. :-D
P.P.S. Am I the only one whose mind went immediately to a recent Microsoft product ad when I read this headline?
Agreed. It astonishes me even more, however, that an organization like this would do so, and doubly so that anyone in their right minds doing anything more than a personal vanity site would use the same provider for both hosting and domain name registration. That's just asking for a hard-to-fix DMCA shutdown of the site, loss of the site due to the ISP going bankrupt, loss of the domain due to any number of billing disagreements with the ISP that are unrelated to the domain name registration, etc.
AFAIK, the DMCA does *not* provide for locking the domain registration of a claimed-infringing site, only providing for the takedown of the content. However, if your ISP decides it is easier to kill your DNS and lock the domain to prevent transferring it than to muck with your server account, you're stuck. Why? Because you are using the same provider for hosting and (massively overpriced) domain name registration. Don't DO that.
If I were one of these folks, I'd register my domain in a neutral country. For example, you can register .com domains with Gandi.net in France or with NameForName in Russia, or... well, here's a list of ICANN-accredited registrars, most of which support the .com registry. Find one in a country that has as few ACTA-like agreements with the U.S. as possible. Even with the exchange rates as bad as they are, those two I mentioned still charge less than half what NetSol charges for a domain name, with the added security of making it much harder to attack the domain itself with a mere DMCA takedown notice.
A significant percentage of ear infections do result in the eustachian tubes being blocked, whether due to muscles or due to swelling. Most people don't even realize they have an ear infection until this occurs, as that's what causes the pressure and throbbing that are characteristic of an ear infection. Without that, it's just a dull ache that most people would typically ignore or blame on a sore muscle. Therefore, any treatment that results in massaging the right parts of your neck will almost invariably relieve symptoms of an ear infection if the infection is severe enough. And to some extent, relieving the pressure will allow the ear to be flushed out (that's why the fluid is there), which may eventually result in the infection going away on its own (or it may not).
It's not at all the same as claiming homeopathy works because a handful of people are really dehydrated. Chiropractors don't claim that massage helps when it's really the extra heat from their fingertips that helps.... Proper massage will frequently help with an ear infection. It will not always cure it nor will the benefits always be long-lasting. The end result depends on a lot of variables, of which the closed-up eustachian tubes are only one. It's more like your doctor telling you to drink lots of fluids and get lots of rest. It won't cure the cold, but it will help to reduce its duration and reduce the risk of complications such as sinus infections.
Errr... to some degree.
Well, so some degree, ear infections can be caused by muscle tension around the eustachian tubes not allowing the ear to drain properly, so to the extent that this is the case, chiropractic medicine can help (as can a good massage therapist without cracking your spine). This is probably not by any stretch of the imagination the majority of ear infections, of course.
I suspect that a lot of the things that many people suspect are quackery do, in fact, actually prove beneficial *in some cases*, depending on the underlying root cause. The problem comes when somebody overgeneralizes and distorts this to say that he/she can, as you put it, cure ear infections by twisting your spine. Occasionally, yes, but usually not.
I've never seen a single commercial application that tried to scribble libraries outside of the app bundle or "/Library/Application Support/MyApplication" or "$HOME/Library/Application Support/MyApplication". I can think of several dozen examples off the top of my head where I've seen such dependency problems, but every single one of them was an app ported (badly) to Mac OS X from Linux or other UN*X OSes. Basically, it's the result of trying to hack together a quick port without really taking the time to learn how to write software on the platform, and it's a sign of a really lousy application that generally won't get very far.
Feel free to disagree, but please provide a list of commercial apps that misbehave in ways that cause these dependency problems you're complaining about. You might find one or two really obscure ones, but such problems are certainly exceptionally rare. Even the Mac developers who I consider to be bordering on inept don't make the sorts of mistakes you're describing, at least as far as I've seen.....
I see what you did there.
I didn't make that claim. I refuted the claim that there are things that are definitely nondeterministic. There's a difference.
Do your random number generators really use only a single entropy source?
Only if Heisenberg was right. Many, many things in science have been believed to be absolute truths but were later proven to be wrong as new technologies became available.
With Windows, their major OS transition happened only about a year after the first version of Photoshop for Windows came out. It was still in its infancy, so there wasn't a lot of cruft code to port to the new NT core. They've basically been able to get away without lots of huge changes since then because the OS is so fundamentally similar....
Adobe released the first Mac OS X version of Photoshop when the code base was about twelve years old. When they transitioned the code, they hacked and kludged things. For example, judging from a quick "NM" on CS3, huge chunks of their code depends on the crufty FSSpec family of APIs. Those were not officially deprecated back in 2005 (because there were a handful of edge cases that could only be accomplished with FSSpec), but the API that replaced them, FSRef, has been available since System 7 and has been strongly recommended over FSSpec since... well, since 1991 or so.
Most Mac developers had fully converted their code to FSRef APIs in the mid-to-late 1990s because they tend to give a *much* better experience for the user. And now, nearly two decades after the FSRef came out, more than a decade after most other apps on the platform transitioned to the new APIs, Adobe is still clinging to the ancient past.
I suspect Photoshop will need a fairly major rewrite to bring it up to modern standards; Adobe has rested on their laurels for *decades*, not modernizing or fixing any aspect of their software until something breaks severely. So as for fault, I'd say it's almost completely Adobe's fault for being one of only a handful of developers who still use crappy, ancient, pre-1991 APIs.
IIRC, California law requires that all consumer products costing more than a few bucks have a minimum of a 90 day warranty. I don't remember the exact dollar amount (maybe $100), and I can't seem to find the relevant law, but I remember reading it at some point in the past. There's also a minimum 60-day "fitness for the intended purpose" implied warranty in California. A 30 day warranty is almost certainly violating laws in California, and probably in several other states.
If these are Macs, then I can state with a fair degree of certainty that it is NOT possible to spy on people without their knowledge. A few days after they started shipping cameras in Mac laptops, I actually had a conversation on this subject with some people familiar with the camera hardware in question.
As shipped, the green light beside the camera turns on as soon as the camera is activated, and at the time, I was told that there is no way to disable it in software even by writing custom drivers. You would actually have to flash the camera with new firmware, and I'm not even sure if you could do it even then. You'd probably have to physically disable the light.
Unless you need to work in CMYK.
err... he/she
I think the reason the author is mad is that he/sbe jumps to the incorrect assumption that Adobe designed the PSD file format. Rather more likely, it is a half-assed dump of a bunch of internal data structures in native Mac byte order and structure packing, with shittons of hacks wrapped around it to make it load on x86 and other little endian architectures, shittons of additional hacks to force the packing to remain the same in Mac OS X, etc. It's not a "designed" file format so much as an example of what happens when a bunch of code monkeys fling data feces at a wall at maximum velocity and let it stick where it wants to. With that perspective, all of the inconsistencies noted in that comment suddenly make perfect sense.
My favorite quote is the checkin message, which pretty much says everything:
My thoughts exactly. Bear in mind that if the file format (the most exposed, most critical piece of code in any application) sucks that badly, the rest of the application code is probably worse. Terrifying, really, particularly when you realize that this HFSX-incompatible piece of buggy-DRM-encumbered dingo turd costs $1,000.
err... let a pissant company...
Apple and Adobe are at odds because Adobe seems completely unwilling to do the slightest bit of work to keep their software working reliably in Mac OS X. As I understand it, the entire Carbon environment was basically an effort to placate Adobe because they balked at porting to Cocoa. And Flash? I don't know the statistics, but nearly every Safari crash I've ever seen can be pinned on Flash. For a while there, I was seeing better than one a week. Every single one of those crashes is a likely security hole. Personally, I would much rather have Silverlight on my iPhone than Flash....
The Creative Suite is particularly appalling. They've made it an official policy not to allow installation on case-sensitive HFS+. Case-sensitive HFS+ was introduced in Panther (10.3) back in in 2003. So here we are almost seven years later, and apparently that still isn't enough time for Adobe to spend eight or ten engineer hours to fix these bugs. Let me state that again. It takes less than an engineer day to run a handful of scripts, determine what filenames in your project are wrong, and fix them, even for a huge project like Photoshop. There's absolutely no plausible excuse for Adobe to still have this problem in CS4 except for complete and total apathy towards their Mac OS X customers.
Adobe isn't lazy. Adobe is flat out incompetent. As such, I've stopped buying their software. I'll consider buying an update when I can install it without wasting three days of my time doing horrible hacks just to get it to install and launch. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend a pissant company like Adobe dictate my volume format, and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars on another upgrade only to be told by their tech support that I can't install unless I reformat my hard drive and reinstall everything. Fuck you, Adobe. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. You aren't as important as you seem to think you are.
As far as I'm concerned, the best thing Apple could do is to buy Adobe, fire the entire development team, and hire three engineers to rewrite the Mac port of Photoshop over the next year and kill Flash entirely.
Are you sure? I thought I read somewhere that Adobe outsourced much of their engineering to India several years ago.... Maybe it was just tech support. *shrugs*
Not correct. The beachballing is not caused by a bug in Mac OS X (usually). The beachball indicates that the foreground application is not responding to events. About 99.999% of beachballs are caused by an application bug---specifically, the application doing too much work or blocking for too long on its main application thread and not pulling events off the event queue in a timely manner.
If the machine is unresponsive, it indicates that some critical daemon like coreservicesd is wedged, crashed, etc. and is thus causing all applications' main program loops to hang and not respond to events. Usually, however, this is not the case, and clicking to other applications results in normal behavior. Oh, and the other thing that can cause beachballs and general system unresponsiveness is an application being a pig and eating all the available RAM, causing other apps to get paged out to disk to make room. You can tell if that's what's happening because your hard drive sounds like raindrops being fired out at 1000 MPH at a sheet of aluminum foil....
Defective cache RAM on the drive's circuit board, perhaps?
I guess it will require some work with a standard NASA adjustment tool before any replacement part will fit.
So basically it's just like Italian automobiles, then? :-D
How are those ten day weeks working out for you, anyway? :-D
You're trying to make me cry, aren't you?