All major desktop OSes are more than fast enough to handle multimedia.
That depends on your definition of multimedia. There is no (mainstream) Linux distribution that, "out of the box" is fast enough to handle professional audio requirements. The fact that Linux can handle such things when patched is because of the great work of people like Ingo Molnar. Yes, the stock 2.6.12 kernel is now better than any Windows release to date in this area. But its still not possible to get the performance of OS X without running a patched kernel.
the jury found him guilty of, in essence, destroying the livelihoods not to mention the pensions of thousands of people. ebbers has caused more misery than most serial killers will ever manage to. i don't know what a suitable sentence really is, but it sure as hell isn't a couple of years.
The archive is being sued by Health Advocates, not the legal firm that had defended Health Advocates. In fact, the legal firm is named in the suit as well.
And to clarify: its not a simple "you have our stuff stored on your systems" claim. Rather, Health Advocates is claiming that the archive failed to follow the instructions in robots.txt that were intended to prevent access to historical material.
The issue at hand is whether programs like OpenOffice are in fact trying to be innovative, are conceived with innovation in mind etc. I claim that they are not and that depending on your viewpoint this is entirely justifiable. That is: there is no failure to innovate here, instead there is a decision not to innovate, at least not in any substantive way.
There is an entirely separate issue of whether people should be attempting to write innovative new software that performs various functions already reasonably well-served by programs like Office, Excel etc.
Office, at this point in its life cycle, is no more innovative than OpenOffice. As it should be? Who really knows... As intended? Almost certainly.
Frankly, I think you've totally missed the reason why applications like OpenOffice got written. A couple of years ago, everyone who wanted to use open source systems or wanted others to use open systems was saying that they need a replacement for MS Office. Not "an improvement", not "a more innovative program that does similar things" but a more or less exact replacement so that user retraining time was minimized.
So, OpenOffice somes along (c/o StarOffice), and everyone says "its not innovative", "they didn't do anything new". They were not trying to do anything new. The application is there to provide a recognizable, usable alternative for MS Office users on Windows and a recognizable, usable alternative for users on other operating systems. Nothing more.
My own area of open source development - pro audio tools like ardour - is full of people who don't want "better" or "more innovative" tools than ProTools, Nuendo, Cubase SX etc: they want tools that work just like them, in fact preferably as close as possible to all of them, depending on who you talk to.
The lack of innovation in most open source apps doesn't reflect on the creativity of the open source development community, but the inertia of millions of computer users who have grown used to existing applications. How many users does Apple's Pages have versus OpenOffice? Why is that?
There are some very innovative open source applications, but they are not direct drop in replacements for existing Windows (or OS X) apps, and as a result most people neither use them nor are aware of them.
SCSI may be SCSI but a Tekram SCSI controller is not an Adaptec SCSI controller, so you need driver for each. WiFi may be WiFi (not, depending on which version you are thinking of), but Broadcom continually makes minor tweaks to their chips that require new versions of drivers. PCI - heh, clearly you've never read the internals of an operating system with all of its tweaks for different PCI bridge chipsets, and lets not forget PCI-X and PCI-E. And don't forget audio, a domain in which there are still at least a a half-dozen chipset makers and at least twice that many board makers with widely different products.
As odd as it might seem, the vast majority of the people who work in the music business are into music. Maybe not into it in the way you want them to be, but into to it. It has taken a real hit in the last 10-20 years from pure-bean counters, but its still the case that the majority of people making decisions at record *labels* are into releasing what they think is good music.
The problem is that what they think of as good music generally doesn't sell very well. So to make it possible to release music by artists you really believe in, you sell your soul and also sell people something you tell yourself "they want".
your comment suggests that bean counting is the only reason any CD is ever released. thats absurd. most of the CDs i've purchased in the last year (mostly thanks to internet radio) will not turn a profit. they weren't released to make money. the difference between the labels that keep rolling in the cash and those who don't is that the former are playing this cross-subsidy game.
the big problem with the cross-subsidy is that, as with TV, the bean counters are getting less interested in subsidizing. they argue just as you have done: "we won't sell less of SuperPopularHookLaden boy toy if we don't release CreativeInnovativeMusician, so lets just skip the latter". this attitude has slowly killed many different kinds of commercialized media, and it is not doing good things for music either. luckily, the internet has come along just in time to save CreativeInnovativeMusician, as long as s/he doesn't expect to return to the singularity that recorded music on vinyl represented for a few decades.
You don't need to live in a perfect world to do without locks. You do need to live in a community with a strong sense of cohesion and a definite perimeter (not the same as a fence). it also helps to lead lifestyles that do not involve owning property that you leave unattended for the majority of the day.
locks allow you to avoid all these burdens: you can have an anonymous, uncohesive community in which you are free to leave your stuff unattended.
the question is: does the value you gain from this ability offset what the value you lose (or would gain) from a social context where locks were not necessary?
however: the most expensive part of making a financially successful recording is marketing.
unless you are making wildly popular music in a style already well-represented in the marketplace, getting the existence of you music out to other people costs way more than actually making it (given the reduction in production costs that you mentioned). its a difficult job, and for a lot of music, its a long term, part time effort.
one of the big problems that musicians have to deal with at the moment is major oversupply of talent. there are a huge number of musicians around now who are at least as talented and making at least as "good" music (whatever that means) as the early progenitors of rock'n'roll, jazz and so forth. there is no way that all these skilled people will get to tap into a revenue stream in the way that the (relatively) few artists at the start of recorded popular music did. as a result, marketing is key, and is going to be an uphill battle for the foreseeable future.
and please, lets not have/. posters prattle on about guerilla marketing. it works for a few cases. its not going to work (and has not worked) for *most* of the artists (for example) on CDbaby.
sorry, but you, along with so many other people, just don't understand how the music industry works.
while it is true that record company executives do make out like fat cats, their income as a proportion of the overall revenue streams within the industry is small.
the music industry, that is, the traditional music industry, is an exercise in massive cross-subsidy. That mega-hit by that obnoxious and relatively talent-free sex-toy-girl-thing? It helped pay for dozens of minor releases that will likely lose money. Occasionally, a genuinely talented artist will make a record that for some reason sells a lot of copies (the Koln concert release by Keith Jarrett is always a favorite example), but even then, that success makes it possible for the iconoclastic label it was on (ECM) to release dozens of CD's that cost them money.
until you get this model into your head, no suggestions for an alternative system will make much sense. i say this as someone who attempted to set up a new label, released 1 CD by an incredibly talented group, and began to realize how it all works.
its a little ironic that he chose ReWire as an example of a proprietary plugin format as an case of "good stuff from the proprietary world". ironic because
its not a plugin format - its an architecture that requires significant re-engineering of every application that wants to use it
because the open source world has already learnt from ReWire and gone one better:
JACK which is free of silly license restrictions, is free of silly limitations and is in every way more powerful. It runs on Linux and OS X, and is the de facto standard for inter-application audio routing on both platforms.
Namely that you spawn processes and use environment variables as opposed to having a message loop and handlers (the way most windows apps are written).
Time to wakeup and smell the ashes. Any GUI program worth its weight in polystyrene beads has an event (think "message") loop and handlers. On Linux too.
There were lots of reasons. I left very early, after only 14 months. I had a new daughter, her mother was about to finish her Ph.D and move, life was getting a little crazy.
But the biggest reason that was actually related to Amazon.com itself was the corporate culture I sensed Jeff wanting to build. This is best illustrated by a short story. Early on, Jeff, Shel and I would often quote the old saying "you can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but you only pick 2 out of 3". At that time, Jeff seemed to fully agree with the sentiment, which was good. But my fears about the culture he wanted were confirmed some months after I left when he wrote the first letter to shareholders, in which he quoted the same saying, but changed the ending to "and at Amazon.com, 2 out of 3 won't do". Amazon.com turned into yet another company that takes in bright, energetic people, sucks their life force away, and then moves on to the next batch of people. I am far from the only person to see it that way, and I did not want to work for that kind of company, or even to continue to help create it.
I have never regretted leaving. It would have been nice to have sold the 1 year's worth of options at the high, and even nicer not to have later had to split the proceeds in a divorce.
i haven't worked for amazon in about 8 years. i don't believe OCLC existed in its present form in 1994, and they certainly didn't have electronic versions of the data, because we were told by most librarians that the LoC was the only possible source. the LoC had an FTP-based version, but it was subject to random updates and was very unreliable in terms of connectivity. it may be all much better now, in which case it is a shame that amazon doesn't do this.
I was the 2nd programmer at amazon.com, back before it was even called amazon.com. When we started, I desperately wanted to offer a browsing technique that would model "dialing down" a search in a huge library - being able to browse the "gardening" section, then realize you were interested in "flower gardening", then "flower gardening, pacific northwest" and then focusing on "history of flower gardening, pacific northwest".
I was therefore very upset to find that there was no way to do this. The Library of Congress could not or would not provide us with their complete category lists, and the company that distributes Books in Print provides the LoC classification data in a format that has been garbaged to the point that you can longer reconstruct heirarchies.
I struggled on with the idea for a while, but we just had to give up. Its been a long term regret of mine.
ever heard of Faust? its a DSP language with a compile-to-C compiler, plus automated front end builders for almost every plugin-ish system you can think of (VST, AudioUnits, JACK, LADSPA, DirectX).
and long before Faust were the series of languages called System-N, the latest examples of which are Csound and SFront. these are capable of operating at, below or above the level of the stuff in Jesusonic.
And even Steve Harris, who has written more DSP plugins for Linux than almost anyone else, uses a very simple generation system that takes XML files containing the core DSP code in C, and wraps in everything that code needs to become a LADSPA plugin. It lets Steve (and a few others) focus entirely on the DSP code, and forget the packaging needed to run within a given system.
Jesusonic might actually be a very good implementation of this kind of idea, but it is absolutely not a novel idea.
As for Linux support, more or less every serious audio/music app for Linux supports audio I/O via JACK, so that audio can be routed between applications, not just to/from an audio interface.
Having ALSA/OSS support on Linux is a great first step, but it already makes Jesusonic less useful to people who make music with Linux than existing tools like JackRack and EcaMegaPedal.
I am absolutely not knocking Frankel's work on this, I am just irritated by people who think its a cool new idea when it isn't.
95%+ of the posters on/., and perhaps even Frankel himself seem entirely unaware that the idea of his jesusonic project is nothing new at all.
there are several so-called "RT VST hosts" that do the same thing, and several standalone programs. most have been around for several years.
even on Linux (even!) we have tools like JackRack and EcaMegaPedal, not to mention the world's best live looper (SooperLooper). maybe Frankel's ideas about triggers might represent some slightly novel model for this kind of thing, but the authors of most of the stuff I've mentioned could probably add them in a day or two.
did you not read the books? or even watch the preamble? elrond was there when the ring was taken from sauron. elrond did not ensure that it was destroyed in mt. doom right there and then. this has nothing to do with gollum.
did you even read the parent post? the writer said that they loved the GIMP interface. the complaint was that the windows version seems different in some important ways.
the main reason is the OSS API isn't capable of being used in a h/w independent way across all of the many many different designs for audio interfaces that now exist. when you look at the contrast between, say, the RME HDSP and an SBLive!, you will see the kind of thing i mean. interleaved versus noninterleaved access, the incredible complexity of many modern h/w mixer designs... OSS has no way to represent any of this other than with h/w specific helper apps that use dozens of h/w specific ioctls.
the other major reason is to avoid direct open/read/write/close calls. even though its the Unix Way (TM), you will note that ever since we moved on from VGA video, very few applications use the Unix open/read/write/close API to access video devices. they use an abstraction and/or a library (X, svgalib, OpenGL etc). ALSA is an attempt to do the same thing for sound, thus making many things possible that are not acceptable with OSS (because everything in OSS is in the kernel; simple example: there is no floating point support in the kernel).
behringer make a motorized fader box with knobs and buttons. it costs about US$220 street price. you can use it with Ardour (http://ardour.org/) and ardour will move the faders automatically during automation playback. its an awesome deal.
Ardour can also do that with many high-end digital mixers that accept MIDI control.
The general protocol for such things is still MIDI, sometimes generic MIDI controllers, sometimes SysEx.
I took a look. It sounds bad. Its also utterly anecdotal. Each time you point to such a report, I could point you to reports on people bankrupted by the US health care system, or reports on people who couldn't get the correct care. What does it prove? Only a systemic analysis makes sense in the end, and when they are done (as in Barlett and Steele's book), the difference in waiting times between the US and Canada overall is remarkably small. Especially given how often people in the US bring up wait times in Canada as a reason to avoid a Canadian-ish system.
And it's also interesting that how you bash the "free market" running the health care, yet fail to mention the malpractice suit crisis here in the U.S.
The link you provided for the malpractice situation makes it reasonably clear that if there is a clear culprit for the rise in premiums paid by doctors, it would lie in the insurance industry rather than anywhere else. Actual case filings are down, awards are down, yet premiums continue to rise. Where are the alternative insurance companies to offer more realistic rates? They seem strangely absent.
As far as I remember, whenever I needed to see my doctor, I can usually see him on the same or next day. I'm satisfied with my doctor, and if I'm not, there are host of other doctors that I can switch to. And when my wife's slutty friend got knocked up, she didn't have any problems getting medical care and Medicaid even picked up the whole tab.
My doctor no longer accepts the insurance I (used) to have. Do I switch? My doctor is no longer on the list of PPO's for my insurance scheme. Do I switch? And is Medicaid (socialized medicine as it exists in the US today) a good thing or a bad thing? If its a good thing, why is it good only as a safety net? And more to the point, what is good about a system that requires so much expenditure on bureaucracy as the current private insurance scheme does? Americans seem to put a lot of emphasis on the "choice" issue, yet very few actually switch doctors (see Barlett & Steele) and there are really no proposals to modify this.
I actually like B&S's analysis and comparison with the Federal Reserve. They suggest a similar "apolitical" agency to administer a single insurance scheme, noting that despite minor niggles with the FR, most people think it works rather well and is generally free of politically driven decisions. In their proposal, individuals are still free to supplement the coverage offered by that agency with offerings from private insurers if they wish to and are able to.
if you're 25 and computing financial plans in this way, you're taking more risk than you indicate.
dollar-cost averaging certain reduces risk, but it doesn't lead to the result you suggest. the way you suggest looking at a 20 year investment is completely unrealistic. Over 20 years, Joe probably saw his income vary dramatically, hopefully increasing but not necessarily. The amount that Joe and his employer invested (or could have invested) would likely have broadly followed his income level, and as result, the total situation is probably rear-end loaded.
if joe or his employer had taken more direct control of the investment (i.e. not merely used mutual funds) there is every chance that he actually lost money outright in investments that bottomed out completely over the 20 years.
if investing in an index fund is broadly accepted as the best long term strategy for a retirement investment, then pension fund managers will be doing that soon, and probably leveraging cost reductions that Joe couldn't accomplish himself.
finally, yes, i accept the risk reduction strategy. the problem is not that collective (private or government administered) pension funds don't work, its that they have typically been robbed to pay for other things, and when a crunch has hit, they jst plead a shortfall. see many recent large corporate stories for examples just as messed up as the story with social security.
and more generally: when people form groupings of some kind in order to get something done (trash collection, policing, road maintainance, etc.), part of the premise is that its inefficient for each individual to have to build expertise in every domain of life that might affect them. pension plans (private or government administered) reflect this idea - Joe shouldn't need to become an expert in personal retirement investing anymore than he should have to become an expert in driveway pouring or stud construction skills. He might choose to do so, but thats a different story. When Joe puts his trust in an institution (a mutual fund, social security, a 401(k) plan), its reasonable for him to expect to see this understanding honored. What has happened over the last 20-30 years (at least) is an erosion in this, to the point where many people feel that they cannot trust such arrangements and need to manage things all themselves.
maybe you should take a look at Barlett and Steele's new book on health care in the US. not only do we spend more, we live shorter lives, get sicker, and actually have wait times for most procedures within a statistically insignificant margin of Canada and much of western Europe. Whatever might have been good about the US health care system, say 20 years ago, has faded in the stupid experiment of a "free market" running health care. Result? 10-20% of expenditure is spent on bureaucracy (contrast with "bureaucratic government" running Medicare at 2-3% of expenditure), and the most senior physicians are just quitting the insurance scene entirely. The fundamental problem is that a free market system works when "selling more" makes sense according to some metric. But "selling more" health care is the opposite of what just about everybody wants from a medical system, and so it starts to break down. Add in the fact that "choice" is virtually incomprehensible in a system where employers pick insurance schemes and most consumers don't know even basic medical facts.
The real truth is that FDR's welfare state was a band aid to avoid a revolution that was brewing in American society during his term as president. Unlike the systems initiated in Europe, which were put in place as a result of direct protest by unions and other non-capital-owning organizations. FDR headed off the fears of the capital owners of the US by instituting a minimal welfare state that did enough to ease the worst fears of the poor, but little more.
And as for your 43% gains this year, lucky you. Just glad you weren't retiring in a period that saw persistent declines in stock values, let alone right after a massive drop like '87 or the tech bubble blowout.
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All major desktop OSes are more than fast enough to handle multimedia.
That depends on your definition of multimedia. There is no (mainstream) Linux distribution that, "out of the box" is fast enough to handle professional audio requirements. The fact that Linux can handle such things when patched is because of the great work of people like Ingo Molnar. Yes, the stock 2.6.12 kernel is now better than any Windows release to date in this area. But its still not possible to get the performance of OS X without running a patched kernel.
the jury found him guilty of, in essence, destroying the livelihoods not to mention the pensions of thousands of people. ebbers has caused more misery than most serial killers will ever manage to. i don't know what a suitable sentence really is, but it sure as hell isn't a couple of years.
The archive is being sued by Health Advocates, not the legal firm that had defended Health Advocates. In fact, the legal firm is named in the suit as well.
And to clarify: its not a simple "you have our stuff stored on your systems" claim. Rather, Health Advocates is claiming that the archive failed to follow the instructions in robots.txt that were intended to prevent access to historical material.
You're really side-stepping my point.
The issue at hand is whether programs like OpenOffice are in fact trying to be innovative, are conceived with innovation in mind etc. I claim that they are not and that depending on your viewpoint this is entirely justifiable. That is: there is no failure to innovate here, instead there is a decision not to innovate, at least not in any substantive way.
There is an entirely separate issue of whether people should be attempting to write innovative new software that performs various functions already reasonably well-served by programs like Office, Excel etc.
Office, at this point in its life cycle, is no more innovative than OpenOffice. As it should be? Who really knowsFrankly, I think you've totally missed the reason why applications like OpenOffice got written. A couple of years ago, everyone who wanted to use open source systems or wanted others to use open systems was saying that they need a replacement for MS Office. Not "an improvement", not "a more innovative program that does similar things" but a more or less exact replacement so that user retraining time was minimized.
So, OpenOffice somes along (c/o StarOffice), and everyone says "its not innovative", "they didn't do anything new". They were not trying to do anything new. The application is there to provide a recognizable, usable alternative for MS Office users on Windows and a recognizable, usable alternative for users on other operating systems. Nothing more.
My own area of open source development - pro audio tools like ardour - is full of people who don't want "better" or "more innovative" tools than ProTools, Nuendo, Cubase SX etc: they want tools that work just like them, in fact preferably as close as possible to all of them, depending on who you talk to.
The lack of innovation in most open source apps doesn't reflect on the creativity of the open source development community, but the inertia of millions of computer users who have grown used to existing applications. How many users does Apple's Pages have versus OpenOffice? Why is that?
There are some very innovative open source applications, but they are not direct drop in replacements for existing Windows (or OS X) apps, and as a result most people neither use them nor are aware of them.
This is utterly and completely wrong.
SCSI may be SCSI but a Tekram SCSI controller is not an Adaptec SCSI controller, so you need driver for each. WiFi may be WiFi (not, depending on which version you are thinking of), but Broadcom continually makes minor tweaks to their chips that require new versions of drivers. PCI - heh, clearly you've never read the internals of an operating system with all of its tweaks for different PCI bridge chipsets, and lets not forget PCI-X and PCI-E. And don't forget audio, a domain in which there are still at least a a half-dozen chipset makers and at least twice that many board makers with widely different products.
As odd as it might seem, the vast majority of the people who work in the music business are into music. Maybe not into it in the way you want them to be, but into to it. It has taken a real hit in the last 10-20 years from pure-bean counters, but its still the case that the majority of people making decisions at record *labels* are into releasing what they think is good music.
The problem is that what they think of as good music generally doesn't sell very well. So to make it possible to release music by artists you really believe in, you sell your soul and also sell people something you tell yourself "they want".
your comment suggests that bean counting is the only reason any CD is ever released. thats absurd. most of the CDs i've purchased in the last year (mostly thanks to internet radio) will not turn a profit. they weren't released to make money. the difference between the labels that keep rolling in the cash and those who don't is that the former are playing this cross-subsidy game.
the big problem with the cross-subsidy is that, as with TV, the bean counters are getting less interested in subsidizing. they argue just as you have done: "we won't sell less of SuperPopularHookLaden boy toy if we don't release CreativeInnovativeMusician, so lets just skip the latter". this attitude has slowly killed many different kinds of commercialized media, and it is not doing good things for music either. luckily, the internet has come along just in time to save CreativeInnovativeMusician, as long as s/he doesn't expect to return to the singularity that recorded music on vinyl represented for a few decades.
You don't need to live in a perfect world to do without locks. You do need to live in a community with a strong sense of cohesion and a definite perimeter (not the same as a fence). it also helps to lead lifestyles that do not involve owning property that you leave unattended for the majority of the day.
locks allow you to avoid all these burdens: you can have an anonymous, uncohesive community in which you are free to leave your stuff unattended. the question is: does the value you gain from this ability offset what the value you lose (or would gain) from a social context where locks were not necessary?
true, to a point.
however: the most expensive part of making a financially successful recording is marketing.
unless you are making wildly popular music in a style already well-represented in the marketplace, getting the existence of you music out to other people costs way more than actually making it (given the reduction in production costs that you mentioned). its a difficult job, and for a lot of music, its a long term, part time effort.
one of the big problems that musicians have to deal with at the moment is major oversupply of talent. there are a huge number of musicians around now who are at least as talented and making at least as "good" music (whatever that means) as the early progenitors of rock'n'roll, jazz and so forth. there is no way that all these skilled people will get to tap into a revenue stream in the way that the (relatively) few artists at the start of recorded popular music did. as a result, marketing is key, and is going to be an uphill battle for the foreseeable future.
and please, lets not have /. posters prattle on about guerilla marketing. it works for a few cases. its not going to work (and has not worked) for *most* of the artists (for example) on CDbaby.
sorry, but you, along with so many other people, just don't understand how the music industry works.
while it is true that record company executives do make out like fat cats, their income as a proportion of the overall revenue streams within the industry is small.
the music industry, that is, the traditional music industry, is an exercise in massive cross-subsidy. That mega-hit by that obnoxious and relatively talent-free sex-toy-girl-thing? It helped pay for dozens of minor releases that will likely lose money. Occasionally, a genuinely talented artist will make a record that for some reason sells a lot of copies (the Koln concert release by Keith Jarrett is always a favorite example), but even then, that success makes it possible for the iconoclastic label it was on (ECM) to release dozens of CD's that cost them money.
until you get this model into your head, no suggestions for an alternative system will make much sense. i say this as someone who attempted to set up a new label, released 1 CD by an incredibly talented group, and began to realize how it all works.
its a little ironic that he chose ReWire as an example of a proprietary plugin format as an case of "good stuff from the proprietary world". ironic because
Namely that you spawn processes and use environment variables as opposed to having a message loop and handlers (the way most windows apps are written).
Time to wakeup and smell the ashes. Any GUI program worth its weight in polystyrene beads has an event (think "message") loop and handlers. On Linux too.
There were lots of reasons. I left very early, after only 14 months. I had a new daughter, her mother was about to finish her Ph.D and move, life was getting a little crazy.
But the biggest reason that was actually related to Amazon.com itself was the corporate culture I sensed Jeff wanting to build. This is best illustrated by a short story. Early on, Jeff, Shel and I would often quote the old saying "you can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but you only pick 2 out of 3". At that time, Jeff seemed to fully agree with the sentiment, which was good. But my fears about the culture he wanted were confirmed some months after I left when he wrote the first letter to shareholders, in which he quoted the same saying, but changed the ending to "and at Amazon.com, 2 out of 3 won't do". Amazon.com turned into yet another company that takes in bright, energetic people, sucks their life force away, and then moves on to the next batch of people. I am far from the only person to see it that way, and I did not want to work for that kind of company, or even to continue to help create it.
I have never regretted leaving. It would have been nice to have sold the 1 year's worth of options at the high, and even nicer not to have later had to split the proceeds in a divorce.
i haven't worked for amazon in about 8 years. i don't believe OCLC existed in its present form in 1994, and they certainly didn't have electronic versions of the data, because we were told by most librarians that the LoC was the only possible source. the LoC had an FTP-based version, but it was subject to random updates and was very unreliable in terms of connectivity. it may be all much better now, in which case it is a shame that amazon doesn't do this.
I was the 2nd programmer at amazon.com, back before it was even called amazon.com. When we started, I desperately wanted to offer a browsing technique that would model "dialing down" a search in a huge library - being able to browse the "gardening" section, then realize you were interested in "flower gardening", then "flower gardening, pacific northwest" and then focusing on "history of flower gardening, pacific northwest".
I was therefore very upset to find that there was no way to do this. The Library of Congress could not or would not provide us with their complete category lists, and the company that distributes Books in Print provides the LoC classification data in a format that has been garbaged to the point that you can longer reconstruct heirarchies.
I struggled on with the idea for a while, but we just had to give up. Its been a long term regret of mine.
ever heard of Faust? its a DSP language with a compile-to-C compiler, plus automated front end builders for almost every plugin-ish system you can think of (VST, AudioUnits, JACK, LADSPA, DirectX).
and long before Faust were the series of languages called System-N, the latest examples of which are Csound and SFront. these are capable of operating at, below or above the level of the stuff in Jesusonic.
And even Steve Harris, who has written more DSP plugins for Linux than almost anyone else, uses a very simple generation system that takes XML files containing the core DSP code in C, and wraps in everything that code needs to become a LADSPA plugin. It lets Steve (and a few others) focus entirely on the DSP code, and forget the packaging needed to run within a given system.
Jesusonic might actually be a very good implementation of this kind of idea, but it is absolutely not a novel idea.As for Linux support, more or less every serious audio/music app for Linux supports audio I/O via JACK, so that audio can be routed between applications, not just to/from an audio interface. Having ALSA/OSS support on Linux is a great first step, but it already makes Jesusonic less useful to people who make music with Linux than existing tools like JackRack and EcaMegaPedal.
I am absolutely not knocking Frankel's work on this, I am just irritated by people who think its a cool new idea when it isn't.
95%+ of the posters on /., and perhaps even Frankel himself seem entirely unaware that the idea of his jesusonic project is nothing new at all.
there are several so-called "RT VST hosts" that do the same thing, and several standalone programs. most have been around for several years.
even on Linux (even!) we have tools like JackRack and EcaMegaPedal, not to mention the world's best live looper (SooperLooper). maybe Frankel's ideas about triggers might represent some slightly novel model for this kind of thing, but the authors of most of the stuff I've mentioned could probably add them in a day or two.
did you not read the books? or even watch the preamble? elrond was there when the ring was taken from sauron. elrond did not ensure that it was destroyed in mt. doom right there and then. this has nothing to do with gollum.
did you even read the parent post? the writer said that they loved the GIMP interface. the complaint was that the windows version seems different in some important ways.
the main reason is the OSS API isn't capable of being used in a h/w independent way across all of the many many different designs for audio interfaces that now exist. when you look at the contrast between, say, the RME HDSP and an SBLive!, you will see the kind of thing i mean. interleaved versus noninterleaved access, the incredible complexity of many modern h/w mixer designs ... OSS has no way to represent any of this other than with h/w specific helper apps that use dozens of h/w specific ioctls.
the other major reason is to avoid direct open/read/write/close calls. even though its the Unix Way (TM), you will note that ever since we moved on from VGA video, very few applications use the Unix open/read/write/close API to access video devices. they use an abstraction and/or a library (X, svgalib, OpenGL etc). ALSA is an attempt to do the same thing for sound, thus making many things possible that are not acceptable with OSS (because everything in OSS is in the kernel; simple example: there is no floating point support in the kernel).
behringer make a motorized fader box with knobs and buttons. it costs about US$220 street price. you can use it with Ardour (http://ardour.org/) and ardour will move the faders automatically during automation playback. its an awesome deal.
Ardour can also do that with many high-end digital mixers that accept MIDI control.
The general protocol for such things is still MIDI, sometimes generic MIDI controllers, sometimes SysEx.
and if you lived in Japan, where stocks declined for 10 straight years, what would you have done then?
I guess you haven't seen this report.
I took a look. It sounds bad. Its also utterly anecdotal. Each time you point to such a report, I could point you to reports on people bankrupted by the US health care system, or reports on people who couldn't get the correct care. What does it prove? Only a systemic analysis makes sense in the end, and when they are done (as in Barlett and Steele's book), the difference in waiting times between the US and Canada overall is remarkably small. Especially given how often people in the US bring up wait times in Canada as a reason to avoid a Canadian-ish system.And it's also interesting that how you bash the "free market" running the health care, yet fail to mention the malpractice suit crisis here in the U.S.
The link you provided for the malpractice situation makes it reasonably clear that if there is a clear culprit for the rise in premiums paid by doctors, it would lie in the insurance industry rather than anywhere else. Actual case filings are down, awards are down, yet premiums continue to rise. Where are the alternative insurance companies to offer more realistic rates? They seem strangely absent.
As far as I remember, whenever I needed to see my doctor, I can usually see him on the same or next day. I'm satisfied with my doctor, and if I'm not, there are host of other doctors that I can switch to. And when my wife's slutty friend got knocked up, she didn't have any problems getting medical care and Medicaid even picked up the whole tab.
My doctor no longer accepts the insurance I (used) to have. Do I switch? My doctor is no longer on the list of PPO's for my insurance scheme. Do I switch? And is Medicaid (socialized medicine as it exists in the US today) a good thing or a bad thing? If its a good thing, why is it good only as a safety net? And more to the point, what is good about a system that requires so much expenditure on bureaucracy as the current private insurance scheme does? Americans seem to put a lot of emphasis on the "choice" issue, yet very few actually switch doctors (see Barlett & Steele) and there are really no proposals to modify this.
I actually like B&S's analysis and comparison with the Federal Reserve. They suggest a similar "apolitical" agency to administer a single insurance scheme, noting that despite minor niggles with the FR, most people think it works rather well and is generally free of politically driven decisions. In their proposal, individuals are still free to supplement the coverage offered by that agency with offerings from private insurers if they wish to and are able to.
if you're 25 and computing financial plans in this way, you're taking more risk than you indicate.
dollar-cost averaging certain reduces risk, but it doesn't lead to the result you suggest. the way you suggest looking at a 20 year investment is completely unrealistic. Over 20 years, Joe probably saw his income vary dramatically, hopefully increasing but not necessarily. The amount that Joe and his employer invested (or could have invested) would likely have broadly followed his income level, and as result, the total situation is probably rear-end loaded. if joe or his employer had taken more direct control of the investment (i.e. not merely used mutual funds) there is every chance that he actually lost money outright in investments that bottomed out completely over the 20 years.
if investing in an index fund is broadly accepted as the best long term strategy for a retirement investment, then pension fund managers will be doing that soon, and probably leveraging cost reductions that Joe couldn't accomplish himself.
finally, yes, i accept the risk reduction strategy. the problem is not that collective (private or government administered) pension funds don't work, its that they have typically been robbed to pay for other things, and when a crunch has hit, they jst plead a shortfall. see many recent large corporate stories for examples just as messed up as the story with social security.
and more generally: when people form groupings of some kind in order to get something done (trash collection, policing, road maintainance, etc.), part of the premise is that its inefficient for each individual to have to build expertise in every domain of life that might affect them. pension plans (private or government administered) reflect this idea - Joe shouldn't need to become an expert in personal retirement investing anymore than he should have to become an expert in driveway pouring or stud construction skills. He might choose to do so, but thats a different story. When Joe puts his trust in an institution (a mutual fund, social security, a 401(k) plan), its reasonable for him to expect to see this understanding honored. What has happened over the last 20-30 years (at least) is an erosion in this, to the point where many people feel that they cannot trust such arrangements and need to manage things all themselves.
maybe you should take a look at Barlett and Steele's new book on health care in the US. not only do we spend more, we live shorter lives, get sicker, and actually have wait times for most procedures within a statistically insignificant margin of Canada and much of western Europe. Whatever might have been good about the US health care system, say 20 years ago, has faded in the stupid experiment of a "free market" running health care. Result? 10-20% of expenditure is spent on bureaucracy (contrast with "bureaucratic government" running Medicare at 2-3% of expenditure), and the most senior physicians are just quitting the insurance scene entirely. The fundamental problem is that a free market system works when "selling more" makes sense according to some metric. But "selling more" health care is the opposite of what just about everybody wants from a medical system, and so it starts to break down. Add in the fact that "choice" is virtually incomprehensible in a system where employers pick insurance schemes and most consumers don't know even basic medical facts.
The real truth is that FDR's welfare state was a band aid to avoid a revolution that was brewing in American society during his term as president. Unlike the systems initiated in Europe, which were put in place as a result of direct protest by unions and other non-capital-owning organizations. FDR headed off the fears of the capital owners of the US by instituting a minimal welfare state that did enough to ease the worst fears of the poor, but little more.
And as for your 43% gains this year, lucky you. Just glad you weren't retiring in a period that saw persistent declines in stock values, let alone right after a massive drop like '87 or the tech bubble blowout.