Experts say that once they have found a crack team of 2 dimensional cosmonauts able to live in the 400 square meters provided, they will have solved one of the major problems of space travel, namely the cumbersome insistence of previous space travellers on 3 the provision of dimensional living spaces.
well, if you bothered to RTFA, you would know that the experiment is being run by the Institute of Biological and Medical Problems in Moscow, and whole point of the it is to investigate the psychological effects of isolation, communication delays and medical self-reliance.
I'm in complete agreement about non-real time rendering, I've been wanting this for many years too - my work-round is to go make a cup of tea:-)
I'm a Mac fanatic, but I can understand the frustration of switching platform. I still highly recommend you go grab the demo version of MetaSynth and have a really good play with it, it's just such an amazing pice of code it might just convert you to Mac evangelism!
Thanks for filling in the gaps - I still diagnose a terminal case of bleeding-edge-itis!
At the moment, Logic on the Mac does nothing much theat Logic on the PC doesn't have. In a few months that will probably change, but let's not forget that every single album made so far has been put together without the benefits of whatever the next version of Logic will have.
I suggest you go back to Logic on the PC, because it's a damn fine professional-level product which has a steep learning curve as it's main weakness, and you are past that now.
Grab the demo of MetaSynth and give it a few dozen hours of your free time. It's Mac only and it's good enough (imho) that it might single-handedly justify mac ownership for you, it does for me.
You haven't explained what your problem with Logic is, or why you moved from Logic on PC to Logic on Mac, but I suspect you are trying to keep up with the latest version and installing every plug-in you can get your hands on (after all, this IS a geek site, right?).
My advice is to simply stop trying to be at the bleeding edge of technology and concentrate on making music.
Any recent computer is capable of things that professional studios could only dream about 10 years ago. Most of the albums you own were made with equipment that geeks like us would now consider hideously obsolete, but that didn't get in the way of the music!
You don't need to be cutting edge. You don't need to have the latest versions. You don't need the latest hot software. What you do need is stability and ease of use, and the easiest way to get this is to strip your current set-up down to basics, and then don't mess with it!
Throw away all your unstable plug-ins, sell off any troublesome hardware, and go back to the most recent completely stable version of Logic that you have. Set yourself very cautious a limit on the number of audio tracks you will use, and only use plug ins when absolutely necessary. Treat your recording set-up as a piece of consumer hardware - it's complete and non-upgradable as of now.
For the record, I own (legitimately) Logic Audio Platinum, but make most of my music (or at least get it to the demo stage) in the highly restricted free version, Logic Fun.
However, if you want to explore new methods of sound scupting, I highly recommend MetaSynth (www.metasynth.com), this is a package that can do incredible things with sound, is stable, has a thriving user community, and is very well supported by it's developers, U&I Software.
If you simply must have a G3 machine, for whatever reason, why not get an entire second hand Mac for the same sort of price that these people were trying to charge for just a mobo?
Don't like US radio? Listen to streaming radio from somewhere else!
Here in the UK, we have a reasonably enlightened regulatory framework which gives us advert-free streams from the BBC, and gems like ResonanceFM.com which plays 'art radio' which is so abaout as far from pop music as you can possibly get - I highly recommend rsonance to people wishing to broaden their exposure to the unusual!
There is a natural tendency to think that this is all about keeping the data safe, or about having procedures in place, but I have a different way of looking at it that I think is more practical:
Make sure the company stays profitable.
All this involves is insuring against disasters, and making sure the payout will *exceed* whatever it costs to recover.
If my office exploded and I had to re-build everything from scratch, I'm fine, because my company will soon be getting a cheque that will cover everything, including the expected profits for the next 6 months. If we rebuild in 5 months, the disaster is actually a revenue generator for the company.
Compare this to someone with excellent plans and the ability to get rebuilt in just a month, but no insurance on the lost profits. They are facing a net loss even if they work like crazy and get the rebuild done in 3 weeks.
Of course you should still do off-site backups to deal with problems that are 'serious' but not 'disasterous', and have contingency plans in place for day to day traumas, but I think the best way to deal with 'the big one' is simply to insure against it, and make sure the insurance covers the lost profits.
This is interesting, maybe it's symptomatic of the kind of people that are sticking to the old OS? I (and the other people in the building) are 'creatives' or creatives with strong 'techie' leanings, maybe the sort of people who develop software also the people who are most inclined to be early adopters of OSX?
As for maintaining an OS9 port, I know that is too much to expect, but how much work would be invovled in just porting it once, for us to get the spam filters?
Maybe us creatives could have a whip-round to fund someone to port 1.4? I know it would make sound business sense for companies like mine to invest in a good spam-filter, and doing this by contributing funding for a paid a developer to port open source software seems like an ideal way to do it.
I'll stick the first $50 in the pot, out of my own pocket.
It's interesting/annoying that since version 1.2, Mozilla only supports Mac OSX, especially given that a large portion of the Apple community is unwilling to move to the new system.
I'm in a building where there are about 2 dozen macs, and I've converted about 50% of the people here to Mozilla, but as none of us use OSX (and quite a few have horror stories about trying to change), I'm starting to see people switch back to IE.
I'm not trying to spark off the MacOS vs OSX debate here, but I wonder if the Mozilla project will end up losing a lot of it's market share by not supporting people like me who can't/won't/don't need to switch to OSX. It's strange that there are ports to OSes so obscure that I've never heard of them, but not the OS that the majority of people in my building use.
Is there any way which someone not tech-savvy enough to help with a port to OS9 could help to persuade the Mozilla people to give us the extra features and stability that we are missing out on?
Being the only MacOS browser with decent spam filtering would give people a really good reason to change, I'm sure I could boost Mozilla's market share here to 80-90% in that was available for MacOS.
All software in my company that requires registration is given the name "everybody" and organisation "everywhere".
Maily this is done so we don't get outdated information there when people leaving the company, or the business name changes, but I suppose it might enable legal reselling beyond the shrink-wrap's (highly questionable) restrictions, since the software proudly proclaims "this product is licenced to everybody everywhere" when it loads.
One minor flaw with this is that one unfortunate PHB didn't notice that these were his defaults, and ended up with the e-mail address "anybody@msn.com" - you wouldn't believe number of clueless e-mail complaints and dumb-ass tech support requests that got sent to that address in the brief time that we had it!
1) phone legislator 2) ask him his exact location 3) if he tells you, say thanks and hang up. Wait 5 minutes go back to step 1) 4) if he hangs up without telling you, get him locked up for concealing the destination of the telecommunication.
Repeat until all the legislators are locked up, then elect some people who are less dumb.
There may be a get-out here - if the parent post is giving the exact wording, it is the origin or destination of the *service*, not the telecommunication itself that can't be concealed. This means you can conceal your cell phone, but you can't conceal which teleco you bought it from.
"I have a formula P(x) that can always churn out primes, give me a number, any number and after the application of my formula, I can guarantee that it will be a prime number."
If you could do that, I have a whole bunch of NP complete problems for you to work on (and a bone to pick with a certain Mr. Godel).
x-x+7 gives a prime number for every value of x;-)
It's not the fault of the browser if a website isn't robust.
While I can understand ESPN's business decision to go with a pretty but fragile design instead of paying the extra for robustness, I don't think it's fair to blame the browser for not anticipating changes to the standards - remember that Netscape 4.7 was widely hailed as the MOST standards compliant browser when it was launched.
It is worth remembering that HTML was never originally intended to be a page layout language - think about what the abbreviation stanfs for, HyperText Mark-up Language - the idea was that you should 'mark-up' your text to indicate which parts should be treated as titles, which are bold, etc, and the decision on how to display those annotations is left to the browser, which would then 'skin' the text to the user's design preferences.
Oh, and javascript works just as well turned off in Netscape 4.7 as it does turned off in Mozilla;-)
I haven't had a single Netscape related crash for weeks, but the final version of Mozilla for my OS falls over every 50 pages or so.
As for the others, I'll install Opera when it does something extra that is worth learning a whole new program for, Konqueror when it does that AND has a Mac OS version, and Internet Explorer when hell freezes over.
I do care about layout, but I care more about speed, stability, memory footprint, and most importantly user interface familiarity, which is I why I use Netscape 4.7
I do have an old slow and buggy version of Mozilla on my computer for those few pages that would rather display a ".css not found' error than their content, but since the Mozilla people dropped support for Mac OS9, I would have to either go with an obscure browser, install a Microsoft product or change my entire OS just to look at a few over-designed web sites.
How long is this DVD, 15 hours? Why on earth are so many songs needed?
It's very difficult to know what to suggest, since we are given no clue as to what kind of music is required, and why there is such an extaordinarily high number of songs involved.
There are 2 people who you have to pay to legitimately use music, the performer and the composer.
So, if you are looking for specific songs, you are out of luck, as you would still have to pay the composer of the music even if you do find a 'free' performance with no mechanical rights fees to pay.
Classical music is (usually) out of copyright because it is long enough after the composer's death, but you still have to pay mechanical rights for the particular recording you are using, you can usually cheat your way past that by fending off anyone chasing for money by saying it's not their recording you used - a defence that would be almost impossible to deny if there are dozens of recordings of the work in question.
I would suggest getting the school music department to come up with something for you.
The article you linked to has the DX7 appearing in 1984 (most sites that google threw up agree it was actually 1983 though), and MIDI as you say first appearing in the shops in 1982.
As for the DX7 having 'unprecedented sounds', since it was actually a cut-down version of Yamaha's GX1/DX1 monsters, there was nothing new there sonically. What was revolutionary was the price.
The Evolver does look very interesting though, that and the Neuron (which might be synthesisng sounds in a genuinely new way, but it's so obscured by marketing hype it is hard to tell yet) that someone else mentioned are probably much more deserving of a/. discussion than the article we ended up with.
Slashdot Mirror
Experts say that once they have found a crack team of 2 dimensional cosmonauts able to live in the 400 square meters provided, they will have solved one of the major problems of space travel, namely the cumbersome insistence of previous space travellers on 3 the provision of dimensional living spaces.
well, if you bothered to RTFA, you would know that the experiment is being run by the Institute of Biological and Medical Problems in Moscow, and whole point of the it is to investigate the psychological effects of isolation, communication delays and medical self-reliance.
I'm in complete agreement about non-real time rendering, I've been wanting this for many years too - my work-round is to go make a cup of tea :-)
I'm a Mac fanatic, but I can understand the frustration of switching platform. I still highly recommend you go grab the demo version of MetaSynth and have a really good play with it, it's just such an amazing pice of code it might just convert you to Mac evangelism!
- Andy_R
Thanks for filling in the gaps - I still diagnose a terminal case of bleeding-edge-itis!
At the moment, Logic on the Mac does nothing much theat Logic on the PC doesn't have. In a few months that will probably change, but let's not forget that every single album made so far has been put together without the benefits of whatever the next version of Logic will have.
I suggest you go back to Logic on the PC, because it's a damn fine professional-level product which has a steep learning curve as it's main weakness, and you are past that now.
Grab the demo of MetaSynth and give it a few dozen hours of your free time. It's Mac only and it's good enough (imho) that it might single-handedly justify mac ownership for you, it does for me.
You haven't explained what your problem with Logic is, or why you moved from Logic on PC to Logic on Mac, but I suspect you are trying to keep up with the latest version and installing every plug-in you can get your hands on (after all, this IS a geek site, right?).
My advice is to simply stop trying to be at the bleeding edge of technology and concentrate on making music.
Any recent computer is capable of things that professional studios could only dream about 10 years ago. Most of the albums you own were made with equipment that geeks like us would now consider hideously obsolete, but that didn't get in the way of the music!
You don't need to be cutting edge. You don't need to have the latest versions. You don't need the latest hot software. What you do need is stability and ease of use, and the easiest way to get this is to strip your current set-up down to basics, and then don't mess with it!
Throw away all your unstable plug-ins, sell off any troublesome hardware, and go back to the most recent completely stable version of Logic that you have. Set yourself very cautious a limit on the number of audio tracks you will use, and only use plug ins when absolutely necessary. Treat your recording set-up as a piece of consumer hardware - it's complete and non-upgradable as of now.
For the record, I own (legitimately) Logic Audio Platinum, but make most of my music (or at least get it to the demo stage) in the highly restricted free version, Logic Fun.
However, if you want to explore new methods of sound scupting, I highly recommend MetaSynth (www.metasynth.com), this is a package that can do incredible things with sound, is stable, has a thriving user community, and is very well supported by it's developers, U&I Software.
I'm equally baffled.
If you simply must have a G3 machine, for whatever reason, why not get an entire second hand Mac for the same sort of price that these people were trying to charge for just a mobo?
Don't like US radio? Listen to streaming radio from somewhere else!
Here in the UK, we have a reasonably enlightened regulatory framework which gives us advert-free streams from the BBC, and gems like ResonanceFM.com which plays 'art radio' which is so abaout as far from pop music as you can possibly get - I highly recommend rsonance to people wishing to broaden their exposure to the unusual!
There is a natural tendency to think that this is all about keeping the data safe, or about having procedures in place, but I have a different way of looking at it that I think is more practical:
Make sure the company stays profitable.
All this involves is insuring against disasters, and making sure the payout will *exceed* whatever it costs to recover.
If my office exploded and I had to re-build everything from scratch, I'm fine, because my company will soon be getting a cheque that will cover everything, including the expected profits for the next 6 months. If we rebuild in 5 months, the disaster is actually a revenue generator for the company.
Compare this to someone with excellent plans and the ability to get rebuilt in just a month, but no insurance on the lost profits. They are facing a net loss even if they work like crazy and get the rebuild done in 3 weeks.
Of course you should still do off-site backups to deal with problems that are 'serious' but not 'disasterous', and have contingency plans in place for day to day traumas, but I think the best way to deal with 'the big one' is simply to insure against it, and make sure the insurance covers the lost profits.
This is interesting, maybe it's symptomatic of the kind of people that are sticking to the old OS? I (and the other people in the building) are 'creatives' or creatives with strong 'techie' leanings, maybe the sort of people who develop software also the people who are most inclined to be early adopters of OSX?
As for maintaining an OS9 port, I know that is too much to expect, but how much work would be invovled in just porting it once, for us to get the spam filters?
Maybe us creatives could have a whip-round to fund someone to port 1.4? I know it would make sound business sense for companies like mine to invest in a good spam-filter, and doing this by contributing funding for a paid a developer to port open source software seems like an ideal way to do it.
I'll stick the first $50 in the pot, out of my own pocket.
It's interesting/annoying that since version 1.2, Mozilla only supports Mac OSX, especially given that a large portion of the Apple community is unwilling to move to the new system.
I'm in a building where there are about 2 dozen macs, and I've converted about 50% of the people here to Mozilla, but as none of us use OSX (and quite a few have horror stories about trying to change), I'm starting to see people switch back to IE.
I'm not trying to spark off the MacOS vs OSX debate here, but I wonder if the Mozilla project will end up losing a lot of it's market share by not supporting people like me who can't/won't/don't need to switch to OSX. It's strange that there are ports to OSes so obscure that I've never heard of them, but not the OS that the majority of people in my building use.
Is there any way which someone not tech-savvy enough to help with a port to OS9 could help to persuade the Mozilla people to give us the extra features and stability that we are missing out on?
Being the only MacOS browser with decent spam filtering would give people a really good reason to change, I'm sure I could boost Mozilla's market share here to 80-90% in that was available for MacOS.
All software in my company that requires registration is given the name "everybody" and organisation "everywhere".
Maily this is done so we don't get outdated information there when people leaving the company, or the business name changes, but I suppose it might enable legal reselling beyond the shrink-wrap's (highly questionable) restrictions, since the software proudly proclaims "this product is licenced to everybody everywhere" when it loads.
One minor flaw with this is that one unfortunate PHB didn't notice that these were his defaults, and ended up with the e-mail address "anybody@msn.com" - you wouldn't believe number of clueless e-mail complaints and dumb-ass tech support requests that got sent to that address in the brief time that we had it!
1) phone legislator
2) ask him his exact location
3) if he tells you, say thanks and hang up. Wait 5 minutes go back to step 1)
4) if he hangs up without telling you, get him locked up for concealing the destination of the telecommunication.
Repeat until all the legislators are locked up, then elect some people who are less dumb.
There may be a get-out here - if the parent post is giving the exact wording, it is the origin or destination of the *service*, not the telecommunication itself that can't be concealed. This means you can conceal your cell phone, but you can't conceal which teleco you bought it from.
I just had this GREAT idea for a movie! We could get Jeff Goldblum, and have this sort of theme park on an island somewhere, and... oh, DAMNIT!
"I have a formula P(x) that can always churn out primes, give me a number, any number and after the application of my formula, I can guarantee that it will be a prime number."
;-)
If you could do that, I have a whole bunch of NP complete problems for you to work on (and a bone to pick with a certain Mr. Godel).
x-x+7 gives a prime number for every value of x
It's not the fault of the browser if a website isn't robust.
;-)
While I can understand ESPN's business decision to go with a pretty but fragile design instead of paying the extra for robustness, I don't think it's fair to blame the browser for not anticipating changes to the standards - remember that Netscape 4.7 was widely hailed as the MOST standards compliant browser when it was launched.
It is worth remembering that HTML was never originally intended to be a page layout language - think about what the abbreviation stanfs for, HyperText Mark-up Language - the idea was that you should 'mark-up' your text to indicate which parts should be treated as titles, which are bold, etc, and the decision on how to display those annotations is left to the browser, which would then 'skin' the text to the user's design preferences.
Oh, and javascript works just as well turned off in Netscape 4.7 as it does turned off in Mozilla
I haven't had a single Netscape related crash for weeks, but the final version of Mozilla for my OS falls over every 50 pages or so.
As for the others, I'll install Opera when it does something extra that is worth learning a whole new program for, Konqueror when it does that AND has a Mac OS version, and Internet Explorer when hell freezes over.
I do care about layout, but I care more about speed, stability, memory footprint, and most importantly user interface familiarity, which is I why I use Netscape 4.7
I do have an old slow and buggy version of Mozilla on my computer for those few pages that would rather display a ".css not found' error than their content, but since the Mozilla people dropped support for Mac OS9, I would have to either go with an obscure browser, install a Microsoft product or change my entire OS just to look at a few over-designed web sites.
...and on ESPN's redesigned site that is the subject of the article, with the supposed 'browser compatibility' benefits:
"You must be using a standards-compliant web browser."
I tried to read the article, and guess what I saw...
"Please Upgrade Your Browser
You are using a browser which does not support the minimal standards required to get the full experience of DevEdge website."
that's a Dodecahedron
That sounds like Stelarc to me... http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/
How long is this DVD, 15 hours? Why on earth are so many songs needed?
It's very difficult to know what to suggest, since we are given no clue as to what kind of music is required, and why there is such an extaordinarily high number of songs involved.
There are 2 people who you have to pay to legitimately use music, the performer and the composer.
So, if you are looking for specific songs, you are out of luck, as you would still have to pay the composer of the music even if you do find a 'free' performance with no mechanical rights fees to pay.
Classical music is (usually) out of copyright because it is long enough after the composer's death, but you still have to pay mechanical rights for the particular recording you are using, you can usually cheat your way past that by fending off anyone chasing for money by saying it's not their recording you used - a defence that would be almost impossible to deny if there are dozens of recordings of the work in question.
I would suggest getting the school music department to come up with something for you.
The link is just to a press release for "Worldwide Bandwidth End-Use Forecast and Analysis, 2003-2007: More Is Still Not Enough"
The document itself can be yours for the tiny sum of $4,500, surely an absolute bargain considering is contains an amazing FIFTEEN pages!
The article you linked to has the DX7 appearing in 1984 (most sites that google threw up agree it was actually 1983 though), and MIDI as you say first appearing in the shops in 1982.
/. discussion than the article we ended up with.
As for the DX7 having 'unprecedented sounds', since it was actually a cut-down version of Yamaha's GX1/DX1 monsters, there was nothing new there sonically. What was revolutionary was the price.
The Evolver does look very interesting though, that and the Neuron (which might be synthesisng sounds in a genuinely new way, but it's so obscured by marketing hype it is hard to tell yet) that someone else mentioned are probably much more deserving of a