Great -- I love when I preview something and it comes out formatted differently than in my original statement:-(
No only the purchase of Emagic, but the development of CoreAudio and CoreMidi at the kernal levels augmented by a simple to develop for interface in the form of AudioUnits, means Apple's OS is more than ready for pro-audio dominance.
Hell I was bitching about this over on my forum just today --
I love Linux and I run a box in my own studio, but it won't be running ANY audio applications for a LONG time. Right now, its a file server to pass info between Studio A and B (ok, Studio B just happens to be my bedroom -- but since I remodeled my bathroom and put in marble flooring in there, its been a perfect vocal or acoustic guitar booth for mixing without synth effects:-)
Linux has a ways to go before anyone is using any of these applications from a standard musicians perspective. I know a lot of geeks that can grok this stuff, but not standard musicians. That and my time ain't worthless...I'd rather spend 3 minutes doing something on my Mac or PC and get the job done efficiently than to waste an hour getting something configured to do what it is supposed to do and loose all musicial motivation (if you are simply a music TECH then this doesn't really matter, now does it).
No only the purchase of Emagic, but the development of CoreAudio and CoreMidi at the kernal levels augmented by a simple to develop for interface in the form of AudioUnits, means Apple's OS is more than ready for pro-audio dominance.
Hell I was bitching about this over on my forum just today --
Sonikmatter Emagic Forums
I love Linux and I run a box in my own studio, but it won't be running ANY audio applications for a LONG time. Right now, its a file server to pass info between Studio A and B (ok, Studio B just happens to be my bedroom -- but since I remodeled my bathroom and put in marble flooring in there, its been a perfect vocal or acoustic guitar booth for mixing without synth effects:-)
Linux has a ways to go before anyone is using any of these applications from a standard musicians perspective. I know a lot of geeks that can grok this stuff, but not standard musicians. That and my time ain't worthless...I'd rather spend 3 minutes doing something on my Mac or PC and get the job done efficiently than to waste an hour getting something configured to do what it is supposed to do and loose all musicial motivation (if you are simply a music TECH then this doesn't really matter, now does it).
Clif Marsiglio
Sonikmatter.com
My iBook 600 runs it decently...don't know what anyone else is doing to make it not run.
Heck I even used the KBE on some photos I had as I've picked up a decent digital camera over the holidays and have been dying to use it for sometime a little less productive. Only thin I wish was that you could set up timelines and paths on the KBE (ie., not just from A to B, but taking a portait and scanning from face to face without having to reimport the photo and hope that you can get the effects close enough to do the A to B thing again with the starting point being the ending point of the last...too much trouble).
This is way off topic right now, but there are reasons not everyone is picked up.
A lot of programmers are one trick ponys. They have the chops to get something done, but its not something ultimately markettable as a whole. Others, are great programmers and can do anything ya need if given a lot of guidance and feedback from the public -- something you aren't given when only a dozen others have this same device and they too are all working on a deadline -- deadlines are VERY important...I know one programmer that was working for us that just couldn't cut it. Very capable and given all the time in the world, he can do some amazing things. Give him a deadline and you'll see a total of 15 usable sounds in a months time.
Too many guys will work for 6 months to get a GREAT bank of sounds and you wonder why they aren't working for these companies...its because it took them 6 months to do the sounds, something a professional designer would have done in 3 weeks...
There are reasons companies don't go with unknowns. Folks also have to fit into the corporate lifestyle of these companies...are their sounds what this company wants to represent in this iteration of the machne...can they follow the unwritten specs for it -- for example, Kurzweil, Korg, Yamaha and Roland all have specific amounts of padding they want in their sounds (and they don't have time to have one of their engineers redo EVERYTHING...expect tweaking, but more than a few params and you can expect the sound to be skipped)...do you need the sound to clip at -12, 6 or 0dB? There are specific reasons for things like this -- some want more headroom before clipping occurs...others want the damn thing as hot as possible so it sounds hip and radio friendly in the show room.
Most of these guys just don't get it. Some do...and they sell their sounds or give them away and get picked up by a company that does 3rd party where they are given a chance to work on a major project and get their name out there. What? You think Korg is just going to hire them off the street?
If you know anyone with great sounds looking for a company to market them, send a note to my email (above) as we work with both hardware manufactures, the software guys and folks that market 3rd party soundware...
"Korg basically hired *one guy* to come up with all of the sounds used in their Triton and Karma synth workstations - and these are their flagship units!"
Bullshit -- I know several of the voicers for this unit and work with one of them. My company does 3rd party sound design...I know my partner was one of many 3rd party designers, and there are quite a few within the company.
Besides, there are several great sounding Wahs these days. My BadHorsie doesn't sound like the old Morleys but it sounds good on its own (it was designed by a specific artist for his specific needs). I have a few pure digital Wahs that don't emulate anything, but work well on their own...and I have a few ancient ones that are good but noisy as well and I couldn't use them on any of todays recordings unless I needed to go for a very specific sound and the realism was more important than the noise floor. By the time you run a do-noiser on these, you are back to the same 'plastic' sounds of the digital ones.
I've used Webmin before (never saw Usermin...have to check that out) but it occasionally screws up as much as it helps.
Still, I couldn't trust my Window's folks to touch my Unix servers even if its something this simple. For instance, a few months ago the latest version of GCC killed MySQL. I had to go back and recompile quite a bit of crap to use GCC and MySQL STILL didn't work right. It took a few days to get all of this right...
I don't think Webmin is going to give me the knowledge to fix this kind of problem or even troubleshoot it. Windows is moronic enough that most folks can troubleshoot it enough to get it in a working state...again, most of its point and click. We make fun of that on/. without realizing that most folks can't memorize volumes and volumes of information. Even the little knowledge I have just so I can hit Usenet and troubleshoot from there (not a Unix expert by any means of the word) is more than most Windows admin...and face it, computers are needed everywhere and the average intelligence of the public isn't going to rise any just because of job requirements...thus we will have a very small group of people that are capible of taking care of system administration in a way that is required to manage ALL the computers in the world. Maybe Sun is right...maybe THEY need to be running all of our servers for us:-)
"Does anybody get to be a sysadmin? IANASA, but I keep up with this stuff fairly regularly. It ain't hard."
Sure...in most of the real world, most of us have several duties. I am in charge of programming, system administration, web design, research, and a slew of other things associated with computers. In a sense, M$ makes their servers so that folks CAN be more productive...I know Unix and can admin the machines somewhat (been using it since the mid 80s) but its NEVER point and click like Wind'rs.
I have a small team of folks that are constantly rotating because we don't have the money to keep them on indefinately, and as soon as they have enough knowledge, they take off for better digs -- which I don't blame them what so ever. These folks have to take care of a lot of the minor details but don't have the big picture that comes from a full time job for several years and experience that comes from this type of activity.
I personally try to keep up with the systems we have running...but while its not hard, in most of the real world, babysitting a single server will not get you far. If thats all most of us were doing, we'd be able to easily take care of this stuff.
Luckily enough, I run an ancient version of SQL server and thus this all doesn't apply to me:-) Its all patched and firewalled...
clif
Re:Why use AIM when everyone is in the same room?
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Professors vs. WiFi
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· Score: 2
"Am I missing something? Why use AIM if everyone is sitting in the same room? It's a lot easier just to raise your hand and say something. I agree that technology could be better employed in the classroom, but this doesn't seem to be the answer."
Ahhh....but you are talking to a roomfull of geeks here in/.land and they will not get the idea.
Hell, back when Mudding was a big thing on campus ('92 I think was the last year I touched the stuff) the most pathetic thing was that everyone would log into Muds to communicate -- not to play. On weekends when the normal folks were gone, the labs would be filled with smelly geeks all mudding along.
The worst part would be that in unison they'd ALL burst out emoting in one way or another in response to what was on the screen. I logged in to see who all was online (yeah -- I was a geek, but I also had the safety net of having relationships with something other than a computer -- my girlfriend never had to DRAG me away from the computer) and there was not one person on the particular mud that wasn't in the room.
Pathetic...I think it was one of these situations that made me give up the mud, where as friends of mine dropped out of school so they could spend more time with it.
Again, you forget the crowd you are talking to...AIM might be the only way they know how to communicate...these are the same people that can't recognize sarcasm without an emoticon appended at the end of the sentence:-)
No -- why, because Apple pays an encoding license to the folks that license the DVD technology for every drive they sell. It would be cost prohibitive to buy that license for EVERY machine they sell. The encoding license from what I understand is far more expensive than just to decode the stuff.
As such, iDVD is only legal to use on Apple hardware -- which means the licenses was paid. To allow it to run on ANY drive would mean they would be in violation of their license.
Evil -- you don't know what the hell you are talking about. Unfortanate -- yeah -- because I'd like to edit dvds on portables without having to have access to my G4 Tower all the time. Evil...definately not.
Again, I read the requirements and took the risk that it wouldn't work. For $20 who am I to complain -- I thought the hack might work...it didn't.
But don't tell me that one can't buy the software online. I wiped my G4 when I installed OSX and didn't have anything on it except the OS. iDVD2 installed anyways. Didn't do any checks except to see that the drive was present. Its the full version.
Ummm...I've always had distain for folks that 'call bullshit' on things anyways so I'll respond.
http://www.apple.com/idvd/upgrade/
Yeah the page says 'Upgrade' but its the full application...I bought it here and was hoping to use it on my iBook and was a little miffed when it didn't work as well, but I also knew they said it wouldn't work as its spelled out in the system requirements (I was hoping the hack would allow me to edit the stuff and then burn it to my G4 later).
clif
Re:Setting the record straight
on
Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 3, Insightful
That YOU changed. It doesn't stop you from ripping out the copyright notices and claiming that it was written then by you.
The GPL makes its notice to make YOU sign your name to it if you change anything to ensure that if you screw something up that the original author doesn't get his reputation tarnished because of your modifications.
So, I decide I want to change a variable name, I'm now considered to be the only one that needs to have my name on the license.
The GPL is a religion, its not a license. BSD is common sense and is as close to coming to public domain as possible but still ensuring the author gets credit for his work. I wish folks would stop bowing down to the GPL as if it were given to you by God and thus infallible...
Re:Make that "old skool BSD license"
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Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, that is a major problem.
GPL gets around this by asking that you give them the copyright and give them all the credit leaving you with none.
I **HATE** when someone wants credit for the stuff they've created. The nerve of them. Especially after telling you that you can do anything you want with the software only you better give credit where credit is due.
I'm glad you cleared this up for us so none of use that restrictive BSD licensed crapware.
PS. This ain't a troll or funny. Its fucking sarcasm.
As a musician, this is a common practice in my field -- one drive from sounds that the computer can access as well as the computer in the mix.
Under ideal circumstances, SCSI can deal with multiple masters. I believe the SCSI standard allows for a lock on the drive until one is finished and then it releases the lock so that the next machine can acess this. However, in practice most drives don't deal well with this. I've seen good SCSI drives killed because of conflicting signals...all because the musician got impatient waiting for his computer to write a sound file and then letting his sampler pull these sounds.
Again, these are much more plug and play than a Unix box will be, but the idea is still the same. If the SCSI driver on even on box ignores the lock the other master has, you've killed the drive.
Hope that was some help...I shouldn't even talk about drives as I just killed the one for my site. From about 20k of hits a to 0k...all because I screwed up my own backup. Ok, back to trying to recover my Ext2FS partition...
"Why does a 25 CD cost $18, anyway, about what it cost when invented 20 years ago? How many non-geek consumers know about this profit margin, and how loudly would they complain if they did?"
Uhh huh. Yeah. A CD costs $0.25 doesn't it. The pure physical media costs $0.25 therefore thats all we should charge for it.
I'm going to pretend you are just a troll instead of a fucking moron.
You know why a CD costs $18? And thats $18 only if you buy crappy music in over priced stores...most of the times its anywhere between $13 - $15 for new releases.
CDs cost this much because folks expect a certain amount of production work on these things. I've worked with friends that have had studios give them easily hundreds of thousands to record an album (most of the time, the cost to record these things is far more than the artists will ever see in their own pockets).
At one point people could walk into a studio and come out with a finished product a few days later. It doesn't work this way anymore unless you are a true punk band or doing bluegrass or something else that relies on honesty and simplicity. If you talk about the popular forms of even these arts, I've seen 'punk' bands that spend a few weeks on a single song just to make it sound authentic. "Dude, lets get some takes of feedback...you can sample this and make it sound appropriate can't ya?"
As a geek, how much do you expect to get paid a year? Lets say you've been doing this job for a while and you are good at it. Here in the Midwest, I'd be happy with $50k a year. On the coast...I think I'd have to at least double that (if my friends salaries are any indication). So, you have an audio engineer who is good at what he does and can earn enough to eat, own a nice car and raise a family. What should he be expecting to take home? Well, depending on his skill level, this is on par with geek work. So just for the engineer, you're paying $100k a year. If he is the house engineer, he needs to be getting paid even if no one is in the studio.
You have the little whipping boys that do gophering and arranging the mics or rough edits on audio. Lets say there will be 2 or 3 of these guys on the session in various capacities. Lets say $20k each (they get just enough to survive and hope they make it to the positions of everyone else...I've done this in the past, but luckily I've done it in addition to my standard salary and it was more for fun). There is another $70k on average.
You have studio rentals which I'm not even going to try to guess at (never asked, don't want to know...my home studio is big enough for me and is expensive enough). You have the costs of the ancellary folks in this. Your manager gets paid, even if he's getting points on what you aren't ever going to see.
You have your producers, which a good one is going to ask for both points on the album AND quite a bit of upfront money. These days, labels don't like to put albums out that don't make money and thus hire folks that are pretty much hit factories. They are known for their sound. Half the time I buy CDs these days, I check out the producer first as they will have more influence on the sound than the artist -- at least for the poppier crap.
You have to pay for the labels A&R and the secretaries and the CEO and everyone else there. You have to pay for commercials and promotion.
In the end, an $18 CD will probably have cost several hundred thousand. Actually, an $18 CD will probably have cost at least a million...the $13 CDs will have cost a few hundred thousand.
What can artists do? They can skip the bullshit and record their own music. Do you buy from the artists or do you buy from BestBuy / Tower / Whatever? If you are buying from some place like that then we know what kind of music you listen to and the scenarios above are what got you there to buy it from. Personally, I prefer to buy from artists I know. A lot of times their albums are in stores, but I'd rather buy their earlier stuff that didn't have everyone elses fingerprints all over them.
Do you buy CDs from guys you watched on the MTV? Again, corporate music and you deserve to pay $18.
Do you buy bands heard on any radio station that has a 'Morning Zoo' or anything like that? Well shit, I guess we can probably expect you to be paying the $20 these artists will be charging you later for.
Honestly, an $18 CD is worth $18 because it A) Cost a lot to make and the folks that make the music that is a sure hit for the studios charge a lot because they know they will have a sure hit and B) because the fact that you listen to this artist and enjoy the mastery that went into the process of building this music from the secretaries in the front lobby to the producers getting paid millions to smoke weeks while listening to some dumb ass play the same riff over and over until he gets it right 6 weeks later.
You want to complain about $18 CDs, then don't buy them. Unlike overpriced OSs that you might be forced to buy because of business needs, no one is forcing you to listen to this style of music or buy their cds. There a lot of artists that have taken the whole home recording to levels that some of the studios can't at a small percentages of the costs that would have happened otherwise -- check out the URL in my header (err..not right now, because the hard drive crapped out and I'm waiting on the HD and the latest backups to be overnighted so I can get the site back online). Support artists when they tour and buy their music there as they generally get a larger percentage of the money that way (most also have albums not available in stores that are a lot less corporate in nature...a friend just sent me her new demos and outtakes cd that I thought had better packaging and the sounds were actually more pleasing than the overly compressed and blandly presented studio cuts). Remember also, not all artists tour and can make money from doing so -- some GPL freaks think the only way artists should make money is by public performance...
Support the artists that you think are doing the right thing and shut the fuck up about $18 CDs.
Ok, that was my/. rant for the month...back to recording as I only have two days a week I can do this unlike my friends that do this stuff full time.
Oh course its going to add a lot to the price of bullets, at least in the short run. Should the gov't also subsudize the costs of lead removal from target areas where the metal has accumulated itself to the point of toxifying the ground? No. Same argument. Just because our constitution allows for freedom of firearms doesn't mean that they should be priced to the point of making the gun nuts happy and we shouldn't take the 2nd ammendment to meaning that just because you can physically own a gun, finances are your own problem.
As for the first argument, this is far from the actual truth. The tags are already designed and being used in explosives. They are intended to withstand quite a bit of heat and pressure. They are microscopic so that even if most disentigrate, a traceable tag is still easy to find. These things are intended to almost be a part of the shrapnel in that the forensic scientists expect to dig them out of walls and otherwise.
Anywho, I'm glad I got rid of my weapon years ago...I don't have to deal with folks that are at the range every single day talking about what freedoms they are protecting when you can tell that under the surface they just want to shoot some 'sumnabitch'. Shit...we need these gun nuts for the same reason we need RMS...because if someone doesn't care -- even if they are nucking futty -- the rights will be taken away.
Maybe not as is, but with a little change to how these are made, no fricken problem.
Modern explosives are now being made with tiny tags that can be examined under a microscope and one can find their point of origin. As explosives make a much smaller portion of sales than say bullets, they can afford to tag each and every piece of licensed TNT / C4 / Whatever used for munitions or demolitions. Does it keep a crazy from filling a barel up with desiel fule and ammonia based fertalizer and build his own...nope...at least not until you realize that the Oklahoma bomb was detonated with standard explosives as a catylist to the fertalizer based bomb (yet these were also stolen).
What does this mean? One could easily add these tags to both the bullet and the gunpowder. These are small enough they don't destroy easily. Again, it is cost prohibitive to add unique ids to every bullet (currently) and even this would require the manufacturers to modernize more so, BUT if you could add these to batches you could track a small group of people down and figure out a MUCH smaller group of people that bought these bullets than having to do background checks on say a whole metropolitan city that might have several thousand hunters.
Right now, the fingerprinting is using techniques that are flawed...give the system something that isn't constantly changing and you might have something that works.
The places in Indiana that don't change their times are the ones that are more associated with areas outside of Indiana. For instance, Gary, while being one of the largest populated cities in the states is NOT considered an Indiana city by the majority of the populace. Its considered an ugly extention of Chicago and most of our politicians view it that way as well.
Some of our my farm oriented area neighboring other states change because they have to do business with others that are a little more inflexible and haven't learned that in this modern age, face time is not as valued.
I love living in Indiana. I like the fact that it gets darker earlier in the winter months. You really don't get anything more or less done than before. I like the fact that we don't change an artifical number just because it matches some number based on nature. Maybe I'll change my mind when clocks get smart enough to subtract 3 minutes a day 6 months of the year and adds another 3 back every day the others (if I did my math correctly) to be more attuned with nature, maybe I'd allow for daylight savings.
clif
Re:War Chalking Symbol
on
Wartrapping?
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· Score: 2
Doesn't have anything to do with the former symbols, and would take a bit longer to chalk, but when I think of honey, I think of the honeycomb before I do the bees.
Damn...I need to get off my ass and build a directional antenna for my iBook sometime soon so I can try this stuff out. I have access to several points in offices I work with throughout the downtown Indianapolis Area, but they are generally too far from the ground floor to gain access without augmentation.
Again I say bullshit, a lack of proper research on your part doesn't mitigate the fact that you did it wrong.
I'm at my office now, and I just looked in my file cabinet. I have in front of me a compilation of the Department of Justice's ADA regulations and otherwise. This one was compiled from a huge set of sources and even illustrated for the folks that don't like to read and was easy enough for a geek like my to figure out. This one was compiled by the Indiana Govenor's Planning Council for People with Disabilities but you can probably get one from your own state. On the first page of the book it gives the address of
Civil Rights Division of DOJ P.O. Box 66118 Washington D.C. 20035
for a 20 page FAQ of this stuff.
Phone #s as listed -- 202-514-0301 Phone / 202-514-0383 TTY
Anywho, if you would have requested this and done it right the first time, it would have cost a lot less. Remeber, no good deed goes unpunished. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Just because you are trying to help someone doesn't mean that if you screw it up, you aren't doing more harm than good.
Seriously, most of us here are geeks and we tend to think we know more than others and can just figure stuff out. Things like this you need to go by the guidelines. It took me a week to get this info once I started looking for it. There could be things such as angle of the ramp...most have to fall with in a certain level...obviously you aren't going to use a 45 degree angle on one of these things, but do you know what the proper angle is? Rolling into the grass? Could be a safety issue...don't want someone loosing control and sliding right into the street. Grass might be good stoppage for one of these things. I don't know. No vertical walls? Could be something to make these look less like something installed only for a 'criple' and more for someone that might not be less abled. Its an effort to keep these things from being overtly dehumanizing. I'm not an expert on this...I'm simply someone that wanted to make sure we were in compliance and got my office into regulation.
Of course some of this stuff is going to be over the top and make no sense, but I can guarantee I could have build you a ramp for much less that 100k.
Bullshit. Extortion? Do you really know what it takes to be compliant? Not too much. I asked for and received an ADA manual last time I was renovating my office (gov't sent one without charge) and TOLD my employeer we were going to be ADA compliant even if it bankrupted up (not likely, we are a small department in a much larger organization).
What did it take? We ordered a few signs that had braile on them, made sure the aisleways were wide enough to accomodate a wheel chair and got a few tables that were articulating to accomidate the wheelchairs to get under them. Computer terminals were made it be sure that they had the standard ADA compliant software on them (Windows and Macs come with most of this and most of these folks know how to activate them if they ask).
Get the problem fixed before hand and you won't have to worry about someone suing you. All in all, it cost me about a grand for the extra equipment AND a disabilities advocate was able to meet with me to make sure we were in compliance as much as possible for free. Since doing this 3 years ago, I've had to accomodate 2 people. Were they worth the $500 a piece that it cost me? Probably not from a profit centered notion, BUT it was money well spent.
Get the shit done and don't put it off as something to do later, and you won't get sued. If you do and you are sued later, you've made a good faith effort to try to be accomodating. You can't please everyone and you can't expect every situation to be convered but you can try your best.
Actually, if you are only adding one drive, you won't see any speed differences and that Type-R sticker will be the only difference.
Want to run a RAID? Want to access multiple drives simultaniously over the same bus? Yeah, and your computer will be faster. IDE is from what I understand a serial connection. Only one drive can be accessed on any bus at a time. SCSI is parallel and will allow multiple drives to fill the bus's theoretical capacity far more than IDEs because a single drive is NOT going to saturate the bus.
Of course, if you only need another drive or two, grab another IDE card and throw the other two on their own channels (ie., not Master / Slave) and you'll have got as much speed on the computer at a cheaper price than buying a SCSI card and 2 SCSI drives.
Heh! Had some minor damage with the car the other day, might have to see if I can get an extra R-Type sticker while its getting a deep scratch repainted:-)
When you write essentially a 'compatibility layer' which is what Classic Mode is, you should ensure that the standard applications work as planned. I can understand software that needs direct hardware access to to fail...I can't understand software that doesn't failing. Outlook is the biggest of my worries as I use this in an enterprise environment. I am one of the few in my department that uses Macs and they think I'm an idiot for doing so. Yeah, I can pull up VPC to get the Windows Version, but I shouldn't have to.
As an OS manufacturer, I expect some things like a piece of software that is the client to one of the top 2 email servers in the world to make sure that it isn't broken when they build a compatibilty layer.
I say this as a professional software developer, not someone who merely supports someone elses software...
Slashdot Mirror
Great -- I love when I preview something and it comes out formatted differently than in my original statement :-(
No only the purchase of Emagic, but the development of CoreAudio and CoreMidi at the kernal levels augmented by a simple to develop for interface in the form of AudioUnits, means Apple's OS is more than ready for pro-audio dominance.
Hell I was bitching about this over on my forum just today --
Sonikmatter Emagic Forums
I love Linux and I run a box in my own studio, but it won't be running ANY audio applications for a LONG time. Right now, its a file server to pass info between Studio A and B (ok, Studio B just happens to be my bedroom -- but since I remodeled my bathroom and put in marble flooring in there, its been a perfect vocal or acoustic guitar booth for mixing without synth effects :-)
Linux has a ways to go before anyone is using any of these applications from a standard musicians perspective. I know a lot of geeks that can grok this stuff, but not standard musicians. That and my time ain't worthless...I'd rather spend 3 minutes doing something on my Mac or PC and get the job done efficiently than to waste an hour getting something configured to do what it is supposed to do and loose all musicial motivation (if you are simply a music TECH then this doesn't really matter, now does it).
Clif Marsiglio
Sonikmatter.com
No only the purchase of Emagic, but the development of CoreAudio and CoreMidi at the kernal levels augmented by a simple to develop for interface in the form of AudioUnits, means Apple's OS is more than ready for pro-audio dominance. Hell I was bitching about this over on my forum just today -- Sonikmatter Emagic Forums I love Linux and I run a box in my own studio, but it won't be running ANY audio applications for a LONG time. Right now, its a file server to pass info between Studio A and B (ok, Studio B just happens to be my bedroom -- but since I remodeled my bathroom and put in marble flooring in there, its been a perfect vocal or acoustic guitar booth for mixing without synth effects :-)
Linux has a ways to go before anyone is using any of these applications from a standard musicians perspective. I know a lot of geeks that can grok this stuff, but not standard musicians. That and my time ain't worthless...I'd rather spend 3 minutes doing something on my Mac or PC and get the job done efficiently than to waste an hour getting something configured to do what it is supposed to do and loose all musicial motivation (if you are simply a music TECH then this doesn't really matter, now does it).
Clif Marsiglio
Sonikmatter.com
My iBook 600 runs it decently...don't know what anyone else is doing to make it not run.
Heck I even used the KBE on some photos I had as I've picked up a decent digital camera over the holidays and have been dying to use it for sometime a little less productive. Only thin I wish was that you could set up timelines and paths on the KBE (ie., not just from A to B, but taking a portait and scanning from face to face without having to reimport the photo and hope that you can get the effects close enough to do the A to B thing again with the starting point being the ending point of the last...too much trouble).
clif
"She possibly *can't* spell or construct proper sentences when she rights, and depends on an editor to fix her writing."
:-)
/. as I'm use to a spell checker before anything gets out the door).
She's assigning privledges or do you mean Writes
I guess ya proved your point (I'm a horrible speller to...I hate
clif
This is way off topic right now, but there are reasons not everyone is picked up.
A lot of programmers are one trick ponys. They have the chops to get something done, but its not something ultimately markettable as a whole. Others, are great programmers and can do anything ya need if given a lot of guidance and feedback from the public -- something you aren't given when only a dozen others have this same device and they too are all working on a deadline -- deadlines are VERY important...I know one programmer that was working for us that just couldn't cut it. Very capable and given all the time in the world, he can do some amazing things. Give him a deadline and you'll see a total of 15 usable sounds in a months time.
Too many guys will work for 6 months to get a GREAT bank of sounds and you wonder why they aren't working for these companies...its because it took them 6 months to do the sounds, something a professional designer would have done in 3 weeks...
There are reasons companies don't go with unknowns. Folks also have to fit into the corporate lifestyle of these companies...are their sounds what this company wants to represent in this iteration of the machne...can they follow the unwritten specs for it -- for example, Kurzweil, Korg, Yamaha and Roland all have specific amounts of padding they want in their sounds (and they don't have time to have one of their engineers redo EVERYTHING...expect tweaking, but more than a few params and you can expect the sound to be skipped)...do you need the sound to clip at -12, 6 or 0dB? There are specific reasons for things like this -- some want more headroom before clipping occurs...others want the damn thing as hot as possible so it sounds hip and radio friendly in the show room.
Most of these guys just don't get it. Some do...and they sell their sounds or give them away and get picked up by a company that does 3rd party where they are given a chance to work on a major project and get their name out there. What? You think Korg is just going to hire them off the street?
If you know anyone with great sounds looking for a company to market them, send a note to my email (above) as we work with both hardware manufactures, the software guys and folks that market 3rd party soundware...
clif marsiglio
co-founder / sonikmatter.com
"Korg basically hired *one guy* to come up with all of the sounds used in their Triton and Karma synth workstations - and these are their flagship units!"
Bullshit -- I know several of the voicers for this unit and work with one of them. My company does 3rd party sound design...I know my partner was one of many 3rd party designers, and there are quite a few within the company.
Besides, there are several great sounding Wahs these days. My BadHorsie doesn't sound like the old Morleys but it sounds good on its own (it was designed by a specific artist for his specific needs). I have a few pure digital Wahs that don't emulate anything, but work well on their own...and I have a few ancient ones that are good but noisy as well and I couldn't use them on any of todays recordings unless I needed to go for a very specific sound and the realism was more important than the noise floor. By the time you run a do-noiser on these, you are back to the same 'plastic' sounds of the digital ones.
Clif Marsiglio
Sonikmatter.com
I've used Webmin before (never saw Usermin...have to check that out) but it occasionally screws up as much as it helps.
/. without realizing that most folks can't memorize volumes and volumes of information. Even the little knowledge I have just so I can hit Usenet and troubleshoot from there (not a Unix expert by any means of the word) is more than most Windows admin...and face it, computers are needed everywhere and the average intelligence of the public isn't going to rise any just because of job requirements...thus we will have a very small group of people that are capible of taking care of system administration in a way that is required to manage ALL the computers in the world. Maybe Sun is right...maybe THEY need to be running all of our servers for us :-)
Still, I couldn't trust my Window's folks to touch my Unix servers even if its something this simple. For instance, a few months ago the latest version of GCC killed MySQL. I had to go back and recompile quite a bit of crap to use GCC and MySQL STILL didn't work right. It took a few days to get all of this right...
I don't think Webmin is going to give me the knowledge to fix this kind of problem or even troubleshoot it. Windows is moronic enough that most folks can troubleshoot it enough to get it in a working state...again, most of its point and click. We make fun of that on
clif
"Does anybody get to be a sysadmin? IANASA, but I keep up with this stuff fairly regularly. It ain't hard."
:-) Its all patched and firewalled...
Sure...in most of the real world, most of us have several duties. I am in charge of programming, system administration, web design, research, and a slew of other things associated with computers. In a sense, M$ makes their servers so that folks CAN be more productive...I know Unix and can admin the machines somewhat (been using it since the mid 80s) but its NEVER point and click like Wind'rs.
I have a small team of folks that are constantly rotating because we don't have the money to keep them on indefinately, and as soon as they have enough knowledge, they take off for better digs -- which I don't blame them what so ever. These folks have to take care of a lot of the minor details but don't have the big picture that comes from a full time job for several years and experience that comes from this type of activity.
I personally try to keep up with the systems we have running...but while its not hard, in most of the real world, babysitting a single server will not get you far. If thats all most of us were doing, we'd be able to easily take care of this stuff.
Luckily enough, I run an ancient version of SQL server and thus this all doesn't apply to me
clif
"Am I missing something? Why use AIM if everyone is sitting in the same room? It's a lot easier just to raise your hand and say something. I agree that technology could be better employed in the classroom, but this doesn't seem to be the answer."
/.land and they will not get the idea.
:-)
Ahhh....but you are talking to a roomfull of geeks here in
Hell, back when Mudding was a big thing on campus ('92 I think was the last year I touched the stuff) the most pathetic thing was that everyone would log into Muds to communicate -- not to play. On weekends when the normal folks were gone, the labs would be filled with smelly geeks all mudding along.
The worst part would be that in unison they'd ALL burst out emoting in one way or another in response to what was on the screen. I logged in to see who all was online (yeah -- I was a geek, but I also had the safety net of having relationships with something other than a computer -- my girlfriend never had to DRAG me away from the computer) and there was not one person on the particular mud that wasn't in the room.
Pathetic...I think it was one of these situations that made me give up the mud, where as friends of mine dropped out of school so they could spend more time with it.
Again, you forget the crowd you are talking to...AIM might be the only way they know how to communicate...these are the same people that can't recognize sarcasm without an emoticon appended at the end of the sentence
clif
No -- why, because Apple pays an encoding license to the folks that license the DVD technology for every drive they sell. It would be cost prohibitive to buy that license for EVERY machine they sell. The encoding license from what I understand is far more expensive than just to decode the stuff.
As such, iDVD is only legal to use on Apple hardware -- which means the licenses was paid. To allow it to run on ANY drive would mean they would be in violation of their license.
Evil -- you don't know what the hell you are talking about. Unfortanate -- yeah -- because I'd like to edit dvds on portables without having to have access to my G4 Tower all the time. Evil...definately not.
Again, I read the requirements and took the risk that it wouldn't work. For $20 who am I to complain -- I thought the hack might work...it didn't.
But don't tell me that one can't buy the software online. I wiped my G4 when I installed OSX and didn't have anything on it except the OS. iDVD2 installed anyways. Didn't do any checks except to see that the drive was present. Its the full version.
Ummm...I've always had distain for folks that 'call bullshit' on things anyways so I'll respond.
http://www.apple.com/idvd/upgrade/
Yeah the page says 'Upgrade' but its the full application...I bought it here and was hoping to use it on my iBook and was a little miffed when it didn't work as well, but I also knew they said it wouldn't work as its spelled out in the system requirements (I was hoping the hack would allow me to edit the stuff and then burn it to my G4 later).
clif
That YOU changed. It doesn't stop you from ripping out the copyright notices and claiming that it was written then by you.
The GPL makes its notice to make YOU sign your name to it if you change anything to ensure that if you screw something up that the original author doesn't get his reputation tarnished because of your modifications.
So, I decide I want to change a variable name, I'm now considered to be the only one that needs to have my name on the license.
The GPL is a religion, its not a license. BSD is common sense and is as close to coming to public domain as possible but still ensuring the author gets credit for his work. I wish folks would stop bowing down to the GPL as if it were given to you by God and thus infallible...
Yes, that is a major problem.
GPL gets around this by asking that you give them the copyright and give them all the credit leaving you with none.
I **HATE** when someone wants credit for the stuff they've created. The nerve of them. Especially after telling you that you can do anything you want with the software only you better give credit where credit is due.
I'm glad you cleared this up for us so none of use that restrictive BSD licensed crapware.
PS. This ain't a troll or funny. Its fucking sarcasm.
clif
As a musician, this is a common practice in my field -- one drive from sounds that the computer can access as well as the computer in the mix.
Under ideal circumstances, SCSI can deal with multiple masters. I believe the SCSI standard allows for a lock on the drive until one is finished and then it releases the lock so that the next machine can acess this. However, in practice most drives don't deal well with this. I've seen good SCSI drives killed because of conflicting signals...all because the musician got impatient waiting for his computer to write a sound file and then letting his sampler pull these sounds.
Again, these are much more plug and play than a Unix box will be, but the idea is still the same. If the SCSI driver on even on box ignores the lock the other master has, you've killed the drive.
Hope that was some help...I shouldn't even talk about drives as I just killed the one for my site. From about 20k of hits a to 0k...all because I screwed up my own backup. Ok, back to trying to recover my Ext2FS partition...
clif
A geek actually getting some, I've heard everything now :)
No, you were obviously talking about the cost of music because you were talking about $18 CDs. No one sells $18 Blank Media.
I take back my remark about you being a troll...
"Why does a 25 CD cost $18, anyway, about what it cost when invented 20 years ago? How many non-geek consumers know about this profit margin, and how loudly would they complain if they did?"
/. rant for the month...back to recording as I only have two days a week I can do this unlike my friends that do this stuff full time.
Uhh huh. Yeah. A CD costs $0.25 doesn't it. The pure physical media costs $0.25 therefore thats all we should charge for it.
I'm going to pretend you are just a troll instead of a fucking moron.
You know why a CD costs $18? And thats $18 only if you buy crappy music in over priced stores...most of the times its anywhere between $13 - $15 for new releases.
CDs cost this much because folks expect a certain amount of production work on these things. I've worked with friends that have had studios give them easily hundreds of thousands to record an album (most of the time, the cost to record these things is far more than the artists will ever see in their own pockets).
At one point people could walk into a studio and come out with a finished product a few days later. It doesn't work this way anymore unless you are a true punk band or doing bluegrass or something else that relies on honesty and simplicity. If you talk about the popular forms of even these arts, I've seen 'punk' bands that spend a few weeks on a single song just to make it sound authentic. "Dude, lets get some takes of feedback...you can sample this and make it sound appropriate can't ya?"
As a geek, how much do you expect to get paid a year? Lets say you've been doing this job for a while and you are good at it. Here in the Midwest, I'd be happy with $50k a year. On the coast...I think I'd have to at least double that (if my friends salaries are any indication). So, you have an audio engineer who is good at what he does and can earn enough to eat, own a nice car and raise a family. What should he be expecting to take home? Well, depending on his skill level, this is on par with geek work. So just for the engineer, you're paying $100k a year. If he is the house engineer, he needs to be getting paid even if no one is in the studio.
You have the little whipping boys that do gophering and arranging the mics or rough edits on audio. Lets say there will be 2 or 3 of these guys on the session in various capacities. Lets say $20k each (they get just enough to survive and hope they make it to the positions of everyone else...I've done this in the past, but luckily I've done it in addition to my standard salary and it was more for fun). There is another $70k on average.
You have studio rentals which I'm not even going to try to guess at (never asked, don't want to know...my home studio is big enough for me and is expensive enough). You have the costs of the ancellary folks in this. Your manager gets paid, even if he's getting points on what you aren't ever going to see.
You have your producers, which a good one is going to ask for both points on the album AND quite a bit of upfront money. These days, labels don't like to put albums out that don't make money and thus hire folks that are pretty much hit factories. They are known for their sound. Half the time I buy CDs these days, I check out the producer first as they will have more influence on the sound than the artist -- at least for the poppier crap.
You have to pay for the labels A&R and the secretaries and the CEO and everyone else there. You have to pay for commercials and promotion.
In the end, an $18 CD will probably have cost several hundred thousand. Actually, an $18 CD will probably have cost at least a million...the $13 CDs will have cost a few hundred thousand.
What can artists do? They can skip the bullshit and record their own music. Do you buy from the artists or do you buy from BestBuy / Tower / Whatever? If you are buying from some place like that then we know what kind of music you listen to and the scenarios above are what got you there to buy it from. Personally, I prefer to buy from artists I know. A lot of times their albums are in stores, but I'd rather buy their earlier stuff that didn't have everyone elses fingerprints all over them.
Do you buy CDs from guys you watched on the MTV? Again, corporate music and you deserve to pay $18.
Do you buy bands heard on any radio station that has a 'Morning Zoo' or anything like that? Well shit, I guess we can probably expect you to be paying the $20 these artists will be charging you later for.
Honestly, an $18 CD is worth $18 because it A) Cost a lot to make and the folks that make the music that is a sure hit for the studios charge a lot because they know they will have a sure hit and B) because the fact that you listen to this artist and enjoy the mastery that went into the process of building this music from the secretaries in the front lobby to the producers getting paid millions to smoke weeks while listening to some dumb ass play the same riff over and over until he gets it right 6 weeks later.
You want to complain about $18 CDs, then don't buy them. Unlike overpriced OSs that you might be forced to buy because of business needs, no one is forcing you to listen to this style of music or buy their cds. There a lot of artists that have taken the whole home recording to levels that some of the studios can't at a small percentages of the costs that would have happened otherwise -- check out the URL in my header (err..not right now, because the hard drive crapped out and I'm waiting on the HD and the latest backups to be overnighted so I can get the site back online). Support artists when they tour and buy their music there as they generally get a larger percentage of the money that way (most also have albums not available in stores that are a lot less corporate in nature...a friend just sent me her new demos and outtakes cd that I thought had better packaging and the sounds were actually more pleasing than the overly compressed and blandly presented studio cuts). Remember also, not all artists tour and can make money from doing so -- some GPL freaks think the only way artists should make money is by public performance...
Support the artists that you think are doing the right thing and shut the fuck up about $18 CDs.
Ok, that was my
clif
sonikmatter.com
Oh course its going to add a lot to the price of bullets, at least in the short run. Should the gov't also subsudize the costs of lead removal from target areas where the metal has accumulated itself to the point of toxifying the ground? No. Same argument. Just because our constitution allows for freedom of firearms doesn't mean that they should be priced to the point of making the gun nuts happy and we shouldn't take the 2nd ammendment to meaning that just because you can physically own a gun, finances are your own problem.
As for the first argument, this is far from the actual truth. The tags are already designed and being used in explosives. They are intended to withstand quite a bit of heat and pressure. They are microscopic so that even if most disentigrate, a traceable tag is still easy to find. These things are intended to almost be a part of the shrapnel in that the forensic scientists expect to dig them out of walls and otherwise.
Anywho, I'm glad I got rid of my weapon years ago...I don't have to deal with folks that are at the range every single day talking about what freedoms they are protecting when you can tell that under the surface they just want to shoot some 'sumnabitch'. Shit...we need these gun nuts for the same reason we need RMS...because if someone doesn't care -- even if they are nucking futty -- the rights will be taken away.
clif
Why wouldn't fingerprinting the bullets work?
Maybe not as is, but with a little change to how these are made, no fricken problem.
Modern explosives are now being made with tiny tags that can be examined under a microscope and one can find their point of origin. As explosives make a much smaller portion of sales than say bullets, they can afford to tag each and every piece of licensed TNT / C4 / Whatever used for munitions or demolitions. Does it keep a crazy from filling a barel up with desiel fule and ammonia based fertalizer and build his own...nope...at least not until you realize that the Oklahoma bomb was detonated with standard explosives as a catylist to the fertalizer based bomb (yet these were also stolen).
What does this mean? One could easily add these tags to both the bullet and the gunpowder. These are small enough they don't destroy easily. Again, it is cost prohibitive to add unique ids to every bullet (currently) and even this would require the manufacturers to modernize more so, BUT if you could add these to batches you could track a small group of people down and figure out a MUCH smaller group of people that bought these bullets than having to do background checks on say a whole metropolitan city that might have several thousand hunters.
Right now, the fingerprinting is using techniques that are flawed...give the system something that isn't constantly changing and you might have something that works.
clif
Yup....not very confusing what so ever.
The places in Indiana that don't change their times are the ones that are more associated with areas outside of Indiana. For instance, Gary, while being one of the largest populated cities in the states is NOT considered an Indiana city by the majority of the populace. Its considered an ugly extention of Chicago and most of our politicians view it that way as well.
Some of our my farm oriented area neighboring other states change because they have to do business with others that are a little more inflexible and haven't learned that in this modern age, face time is not as valued.
I love living in Indiana. I like the fact that it gets darker earlier in the winter months. You really don't get anything more or less done than before. I like the fact that we don't change an artifical number just because it matches some number based on nature. Maybe I'll change my mind when clocks get smart enough to subtract 3 minutes a day 6 months of the year and adds another 3 back every day the others (if I did my math correctly) to be more attuned with nature, maybe I'd allow for daylight savings.
clif
Maybe something like this: http://tc.iupui.edu/clif/warhoney.png
Doesn't have anything to do with the former symbols, and would take a bit longer to chalk, but when I think of honey, I think of the honeycomb before I do the bees.
Damn...I need to get off my ass and build a directional antenna for my iBook sometime soon so I can try this stuff out. I have access to several points in offices I work with throughout the downtown Indianapolis Area, but they are generally too far from the ground floor to gain access without augmentation.
clif
Again I say bullshit, a lack of proper research on your part doesn't mitigate the fact that you did it wrong.
I'm at my office now, and I just looked in my file cabinet. I have in front of me a compilation of the Department of Justice's ADA regulations and otherwise. This one was compiled from a huge set of sources and even illustrated for the folks that don't like to read and was easy enough for a geek like my to figure out. This one was compiled by the Indiana Govenor's Planning Council for People with Disabilities but you can probably get one from your own state. On the first page of the book it gives the address of
Civil Rights Division of DOJ
P.O. Box 66118
Washington D.C. 20035
for a 20 page FAQ of this stuff.
Phone #s as listed -- 202-514-0301 Phone / 202-514-0383 TTY
Anywho, if you would have requested this and done it right the first time, it would have cost a lot less. Remeber, no good deed goes unpunished. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Just because you are trying to help someone doesn't mean that if you screw it up, you aren't doing more harm than good.
Seriously, most of us here are geeks and we tend to think we know more than others and can just figure stuff out. Things like this you need to go by the guidelines. It took me a week to get this info once I started looking for it. There could be things such as angle of the ramp...most have to fall with in a certain level...obviously you aren't going to use a 45 degree angle on one of these things, but do you know what the proper angle is? Rolling into the grass? Could be a safety issue...don't want someone loosing control and sliding right into the street. Grass might be good stoppage for one of these things. I don't know. No vertical walls? Could be something to make these look less like something installed only for a 'criple' and more for someone that might not be less abled. Its an effort to keep these things from being overtly dehumanizing. I'm not an expert on this...I'm simply someone that wanted to make sure we were in compliance and got my office into regulation.
Of course some of this stuff is going to be over the top and make no sense, but I can guarantee I could have build you a ramp for much less that 100k.
Bullshit. Extortion? Do you really know what it takes to be compliant? Not too much. I asked for and received an ADA manual last time I was renovating my office (gov't sent one without charge) and TOLD my employeer we were going to be ADA compliant even if it bankrupted up (not likely, we are a small department in a much larger organization).
What did it take? We ordered a few signs that had braile on them, made sure the aisleways were wide enough to accomodate a wheel chair and got a few tables that were articulating to accomidate the wheelchairs to get under them. Computer terminals were made it be sure that they had the standard ADA compliant software on them (Windows and Macs come with most of this and most of these folks know how to activate them if they ask).
Get the problem fixed before hand and you won't have to worry about someone suing you. All in all, it cost me about a grand for the extra equipment AND a disabilities advocate was able to meet with me to make sure we were in compliance as much as possible for free. Since doing this 3 years ago, I've had to accomodate 2 people. Were they worth the $500 a piece that it cost me? Probably not from a profit centered notion, BUT it was money well spent.
Get the shit done and don't put it off as something to do later, and you won't get sued. If you do and you are sued later, you've made a good faith effort to try to be accomodating. You can't please everyone and you can't expect every situation to be convered but you can try your best.
clif
Actually, if you are only adding one drive, you won't see any speed differences and that Type-R sticker will be the only difference.
:-)
Want to run a RAID? Want to access multiple drives simultaniously over the same bus? Yeah, and your computer will be faster. IDE is from what I understand a serial connection. Only one drive can be accessed on any bus at a time. SCSI is parallel and will allow multiple drives to fill the bus's theoretical capacity far more than IDEs because a single drive is NOT going to saturate the bus.
Of course, if you only need another drive or two, grab another IDE card and throw the other two on their own channels (ie., not Master / Slave) and you'll have got as much speed on the computer at a cheaper price than buying a SCSI card and 2 SCSI drives.
Heh! Had some minor damage with the car the other day, might have to see if I can get an extra R-Type sticker while its getting a deep scratch repainted
clif
Bull fucking shit --
When you write essentially a 'compatibility layer' which is what Classic Mode is, you should ensure that the standard applications work as planned. I can understand software that needs direct hardware access to to fail...I can't understand software that doesn't failing. Outlook is the biggest of my worries as I use this in an enterprise environment. I am one of the few in my department that uses Macs and they think I'm an idiot for doing so. Yeah, I can pull up VPC to get the Windows Version, but I shouldn't have to.
As an OS manufacturer, I expect some things like a piece of software that is the client to one of the top 2 email servers in the world to make sure that it isn't broken when they build a compatibilty layer.
I say this as a professional software developer, not someone who merely supports someone elses software...
clif