This will be interesting to watch: whilst for applications such as storage and HD cameras, IEEE1394 isn't cutting it any more, it's more than adequate for music production applications, and Thunderbolt will do nothing but add cost to these devices.
The acid test will be Apple dropping the FW S-800 port off their products.
Sure - there's plenty of investment in both off-shore and on-shore wind generation in the UK (this gives a pretty good idea of the scale), but it doesn't change the fact that wind power cannot at present - in lieu of radical developments in energy storage, or demand modulation - provide reliable base-load. Wind-farms - even when offshore generate plenty of objections.
It's disappointing that there have not been more offshore tidal energy schemes, since these could be an entirely reliable energy source. The usual excuse offered is that whilst there are plenty of prototype devices, none of them are considered mature enough for large-scale investment.
Rather than increasing the amount of nuclear energy the in the UK, the proposed reactors are replacements for existing nuclear generation capacity that is reaching the end its life. What is perhaps interesting is that economics are starting to look very favourable for Nuclear generation right now - renewable generation is not cheap.
I'll second this. The Open University is not a degree mill and has an excellent academic reputation.
You can (or at least certainly could when I did it) go straight to a Masters Degree in engineering at UK universities by doing a 4-year programme, missing out the Bachelors degree on the way. It's marginally faster than doing a BEng/Bsc + MSc combination, and academically equivalent.
This is currently getting coverage on the front page of the BBC News website - both the domestic and international front pages - ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world/ respectively). Coverage doesn't get much more mainstream than this.
The hurdle of creating an application and getting it accepted is a much bigger factor than the cost of a developer subscription.
Whilst you can of course submit variations of some generic application, Apple is taking an increasingly hard-line on apps with little apparent customer benefit, so they may well get rejected, the whole process taking about a week for each iteration.
I would also not be surprised if Apple rejected developer account applications paid with pre-paid payment cards - they certainly check the bone-fides of corporate applications quite thoroughly. It's not hard to use a credit reference agency to validate a customer's identity once armed with a name and address.
The judge in fact refused all 8 requests for default. Of the eight, 3 had in fact filed defences, and there was no evidence of service in 3 more. The remaining two were technically in default, but the judge found the case lacked any legal merit due to the plaintiff not actually being the rights-holder or exclusive licensee, and therefore incapable of bringing a copyright infringement action.
It looks as if ACS:Law's business model of speculative invoicing is holed below the waterline and sinking rapidly.
The question I have is whether launching actions with such fundamental errors in law and procedure amounts to mal-practice? It certainly wouldn't be the first allegation of this type for ACS:Law.
EA is excellent value for money, and a very competent CASE tool with some additional bits bolted on the side to aid process. It's what we use (small R&D team in a big corporation), but I don't think it meets the OPs needs as it doesn't offer the end-to-end package with full traceability.
IBM Rational's offerings are a mixed bag - they do offer a full solution, but one made up of disparate parts, generally acquired piecemeal by Rational over the years. Some parts (Clearcase, ClearQuest) are well thought out and implemented. Others were (the last time I used them a few years ago) a complete abortion (SoDa- the documentation generation tool for Requisite Pro being the obvious example).
The Rational Unified Process (RUP) which binds them all together is well thought out and designed to be tailored to organisations with varying degrees of agility and ceremony. Rational Method Composer - the tool for tailoring the process is best avoided however. You definitely don't need Rational dog-food to use RUP (or one of the many other Unified Process derivatives).
One thing that's consistently been true over the years is that IBM Rational is expensive and they will encourage you to buy the entire suite.
Round-trip engineering is a feature may vendors tout. For most, it's a chimera, only really working well for certain types of applications built in a particular way, against particular programming languages and frameworks. It also tends to rely on the idea that you will do a significant amount of design in the model and then turn hat into code.
Not sure how it is in the US, but in the UK the pawnshop is the probably the cheapest and most reputable source of credit open to many poor people.
They are certainly the most regulated, and tend to have an excellent relationship with their local police force. Not a good place to attempt to dispose of stolen goods.
None the less, the interest rate is quite eye-watering.
Here in the UK, lead is commonly used as a roofing material on historic buildings - particularly churches. Predictably enough, it's also frequently stolen. Zinc is also used this purpose.
Copper theft is also common from the railways. On 3rd-rail electrified lines the power cables are rates at a couple of kA, so quite substantial, yet only 700V DC when live.
Steeling copper telephone cables for their copper content is a pretty desperate crime - even at the spot price of copper quoted (the thief will be offered far less by the scrap-merchant) - they'd need to pinch an awful lot of it.
There are surely much more lucrative metals to steel than this?
Or more likely, a small number of crooked customers who have a vested interest in keeping the whole thing quiet.
Note that the a landlord of 22 properties got a longer sentence than the electrician.
Even if the magazines do maintain a strict separation between advertising and editorial, there's still a symbiotic (or even parasitic?) relationship between the two. Without the acres of spurious tech articles, there would simply be no market for many of the products reviewed, and thus no market for the magazines either.
The Sun success in printed form is due to it being a jack of all trades, and the sum of its parts assembled into a convenient form suitable for its target demographic to consume.
That package is not online behind a paywall, but sold in printed form, for (most likely) for less than the cost of printing and distribution to white-van-man, construction workers and the like.
Arguably none of the constituent parts are unique or terribly exclusive, and alternatives can be found elsewhere for nothing.
Do incidents of this nature occur with other manufacturers' cars? Or did the adverse publicity that Toyota was already receiving in the media cause these cases to get the oxygen of publicity rather than being considered as freak, and unconnected accidents?
Quite simply because STL is the embodiment of several decades of algorithms and data structures research work. In many cases, use of STL results in near optimal code.
In raw C, you're left to yourself to write your own collections and algorithms. You have to try pretty hard to surpass the performance of STL. Do you want compiler developers to constantly reinventing wheels or actually improving the compiler?
No it doesn't.
The best you can get is start and stop time of each note and its pitch, and if you're lucky you might have a tempo-map, tempo and time-signature.
Converting from MIDI into score is difficult - particularly so if the music is not synchronised with the beat clock used by MIDI. Variation of the length of notes relative to their notated duration and uneven distribution of beats (or their subdivisions) is an inherent feature of human performance, but makes process of determining the note length difficult when converting MIDI to score. In practice, some degree of quantisation is required to prevent conversion into ludicrously complex rhythms.
Besides notes, there are enormous numbers of score features that MIDI cannot represent - such as slurs, multiple voices, articulation marks, dynamics markings and so on.
There is a Yamaha MIDI profile called XF MIDI that can carry the additional data required to reconstruct a score. It's used by the score display functionality in various Yamaha keyboard models.
Realistically, the only way to use it export the output of an engraving or optical note recognition package into it. As far as I know it is not supported by any of the major engraving platforms.
Since MusicXML can optionally carry presentation data for playback, this is a much more realistic prospect as there is plenty of application support in the DAWs, and also in Cubase which has score editing capabilities as well.
The layout of score conveys enormous amount of semantic information about music - for instance, the horizontal position of notes align across the staves of multiple parts if the notes start concurrently. In multi-voice music, stem direction is used to indicate which voice notes belong to, and therefore also implies phrasing. There are many other examples of this kind.
There are also lots of examples where layout improves the usability of score. Some of them are really quite subtle with the results looking 'right' or 'wrong' to an experienced musician and are tied up with how musicians actually used scores - for instance pattern matching on chords and phrase shapes rather than interpreting each note dot.
As for implementation technologies, it's more a case of tools and libraries available. If converting from MusicXML, there's an awful lot of heavy lifting involving XML, and having decent collection classes makes the data structures and algorithms much easier to implement.
I'm currently implementing in C#.Net, but would have been equally happy with C++/STL/Boost and a XML to object mapping layer of some kind.
Slashdot Mirror
This will be interesting to watch: whilst for applications such as storage and HD cameras, IEEE1394 isn't cutting it any more, it's more than adequate for music production applications, and Thunderbolt will do nothing but add cost to these devices. The acid test will be Apple dropping the FW S-800 port off their products.
Sure - there's plenty of investment in both off-shore and on-shore wind generation in the UK (this gives a pretty good idea of the scale), but it doesn't change the fact that wind power cannot at present - in lieu of radical developments in energy storage, or demand modulation - provide reliable base-load. Wind-farms - even when offshore generate plenty of objections.
It's disappointing that there have not been more offshore tidal energy schemes, since these could be an entirely reliable energy source. The usual excuse offered is that whilst there are plenty of prototype devices, none of them are considered mature enough for large-scale investment.
Rather than increasing the amount of nuclear energy the in the UK, the proposed reactors are replacements for existing nuclear generation capacity that is reaching the end its life. What is perhaps interesting is that economics are starting to look very favourable for Nuclear generation right now - renewable generation is not cheap.
I'll second this. The Open University is not a degree mill and has an excellent academic reputation.
You can (or at least certainly could when I did it) go straight to a Masters Degree in engineering at UK universities by doing a 4-year programme, missing out the Bachelors degree on the way. It's marginally faster than doing a BEng/Bsc + MSc combination, and academically equivalent.
This is currently getting coverage on the front page of the BBC News website - both the domestic and international front pages - ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world/ respectively). Coverage doesn't get much more mainstream than this.
The hurdle of creating an application and getting it accepted is a much bigger factor than the cost of a developer subscription.
Whilst you can of course submit variations of some generic application, Apple is taking an increasingly hard-line on apps with little apparent customer benefit, so they may well get rejected, the whole process taking about a week for each iteration.
I would also not be surprised if Apple rejected developer account applications paid with pre-paid payment cards - they certainly check the bone-fides of corporate applications quite thoroughly. It's not hard to use a credit reference agency to validate a customer's identity once armed with a name and address.
The termination clauses of the contract will probably be considered unfair and thus unenforceable in situations like this.
Service providers and utilities rely on customers not being sufficiently aware or motivated to exercise their rights.
I wonder whether ACS:Law's behaviour approaches the legal definition of Extortion?
There are really only two explanations: that they were incompetent or, alternative, entirely competent, and trying it on.
The judge in fact refused all 8 requests for default. Of the eight, 3 had in fact filed defences, and there was no evidence of service in 3 more. The remaining two were technically in default, but the judge found the case lacked any legal merit due to the plaintiff not actually being the rights-holder or exclusive licensee, and therefore incapable of bringing a copyright infringement action. It looks as if ACS:Law's business model of speculative invoicing is holed below the waterline and sinking rapidly. The question I have is whether launching actions with such fundamental errors in law and procedure amounts to mal-practice? It certainly wouldn't be the first allegation of this type for ACS:Law.
EA is excellent value for money, and a very competent CASE tool with some additional bits bolted on the side to aid process. It's what we use (small R&D team in a big corporation), but I don't think it meets the OPs needs as it doesn't offer the end-to-end package with full traceability. IBM Rational's offerings are a mixed bag - they do offer a full solution, but one made up of disparate parts, generally acquired piecemeal by Rational over the years. Some parts (Clearcase, ClearQuest) are well thought out and implemented. Others were (the last time I used them a few years ago) a complete abortion (SoDa- the documentation generation tool for Requisite Pro being the obvious example). The Rational Unified Process (RUP) which binds them all together is well thought out and designed to be tailored to organisations with varying degrees of agility and ceremony. Rational Method Composer - the tool for tailoring the process is best avoided however. You definitely don't need Rational dog-food to use RUP (or one of the many other Unified Process derivatives). One thing that's consistently been true over the years is that IBM Rational is expensive and they will encourage you to buy the entire suite. Round-trip engineering is a feature may vendors tout. For most, it's a chimera, only really working well for certain types of applications built in a particular way, against particular programming languages and frameworks. It also tends to rely on the idea that you will do a significant amount of design in the model and then turn hat into code.
No. National Rail is a trademark of ATOC. They are already a private company - otherwise the data could be liberated with repeated FOA requests.
Most thieves steal precisely *because* an opportunity present itself to them.
Not sure how it is in the US, but in the UK the pawnshop is the probably the cheapest and most reputable source of credit open to many poor people. They are certainly the most regulated, and tend to have an excellent relationship with their local police force. Not a good place to attempt to dispose of stolen goods. None the less, the interest rate is quite eye-watering.
I'd say incineration is a likely is a highly likely (and permanent) outcome for for copper thieves who dabble with power lines.
Here in the UK, lead is commonly used as a roofing material on historic buildings - particularly churches. Predictably enough, it's also frequently stolen. Zinc is also used this purpose. Copper theft is also common from the railways. On 3rd-rail electrified lines the power cables are rates at a couple of kA, so quite substantial, yet only 700V DC when live.
Steeling copper telephone cables for their copper content is a pretty desperate crime - even at the spot price of copper quoted (the thief will be offered far less by the scrap-merchant) - they'd need to pinch an awful lot of it. There are surely much more lucrative metals to steel than this?
Or more likely, a small number of crooked customers who have a vested interest in keeping the whole thing quiet. Note that the a landlord of 22 properties got a longer sentence than the electrician.
The deeply religious? Certainly lots of parallels: faith in spite on scientific evidence, hatred of scientists.
Even if the magazines do maintain a strict separation between advertising and editorial, there's still a symbiotic (or even parasitic?) relationship between the two. Without the acres of spurious tech articles, there would simply be no market for many of the products reviewed, and thus no market for the magazines either.
The Sun success in printed form is due to it being a jack of all trades, and the sum of its parts assembled into a convenient form suitable for its target demographic to consume. That package is not online behind a paywall, but sold in printed form, for (most likely) for less than the cost of printing and distribution to white-van-man, construction workers and the like. Arguably none of the constituent parts are unique or terribly exclusive, and alternatives can be found elsewhere for nothing.
Do incidents of this nature occur with other manufacturers' cars? Or did the adverse publicity that Toyota was already receiving in the media cause these cases to get the oxygen of publicity rather than being considered as freak, and unconnected accidents?
C++ compilers have been implemented this way in the past, but it's a far from optimal approach for for modern C++ - hence why nobody does it any more.
Quite simply because STL is the embodiment of several decades of algorithms and data structures research work. In many cases, use of STL results in near optimal code. In raw C, you're left to yourself to write your own collections and algorithms. You have to try pretty hard to surpass the performance of STL. Do you want compiler developers to constantly reinventing wheels or actually improving the compiler?
Converting from MIDI into score is difficult - particularly so if the music is not synchronised with the beat clock used by MIDI. Variation of the length of notes relative to their notated duration and uneven distribution of beats (or their subdivisions) is an inherent feature of human performance, but makes process of determining the note length difficult when converting MIDI to score. In practice, some degree of quantisation is required to prevent conversion into ludicrously complex rhythms.
Besides notes, there are enormous numbers of score features that MIDI cannot represent - such as slurs, multiple voices, articulation marks, dynamics markings and so on.
There is a Yamaha MIDI profile called XF MIDI that can carry the additional data required to reconstruct a score. It's used by the score display functionality in various Yamaha keyboard models. Realistically, the only way to use it export the output of an engraving or optical note recognition package into it. As far as I know it is not supported by any of the major engraving platforms.
Since MusicXML can optionally carry presentation data for playback, this is a much more realistic prospect as there is plenty of application support in the DAWs, and also in Cubase which has score editing capabilities as well.
There are also lots of examples where layout improves the usability of score. Some of them are really quite subtle with the results looking 'right' or 'wrong' to an experienced musician and are tied up with how musicians actually used scores - for instance pattern matching on chords and phrase shapes rather than interpreting each note dot.
As for implementation technologies, it's more a case of tools and libraries available. If converting from MusicXML, there's an awful lot of heavy lifting involving XML, and having decent collection classes makes the data structures and algorithms much easier to implement. I'm currently implementing in C#.Net, but would have been equally happy with C++/STL/Boost and a XML to object mapping layer of some kind.
...if you call the ~1/3 of the javascript file initializing the description of the score a 'mark-up language'