I currently work in the field of computer music typesetting, and can vouch for the fact that it is a hard problem - one that is considered not to amenable to being universally automated by computer.
Achieving a rendering of very simple scores such as these is easy, but coping with anything more complex starts becoming a difficult data structures and algorithms problem really quickly, and the layout rule-set becomes increasingly complex in order to handle the myriad corner cases.
What we see here is a great start, it demonstrates that it's possible to render music symbols in HTML canvas, but it's very far from being a complete music typesetting solution that can take an arbitrary description of a score and produces rendered output, which is the impression conveyed to many of those commenting here.
The data model of the score in the example is generated programmatically (it takes up about 1/3 of the javascript file) and is fairly simplistic.
This is an important consideration as the only sane way to create and edit scores is with a graphic editor of some kind, such as Sibelius, Finale, Notion or a bunch of open source alternatives.
Increasingly the de-facto interchange format for these is MusicXML, however MusicXML is largely a semantically oriented description of the score with optional positional data rather than a presentation-oriented one. Indeed, if a presentation oriented description is what you required, you might as well use SVG to start with.
Generally the approach one would take would be to convert the MusicXML data model into a presentation oriented one, applying layout rules as you go.
The small amount of layout logic here is very simplistic. Things become much more difficult when multi-stave scores, paging, line-breaking and justification, slurs and so on. I'd would also suggest that whilst implementing the complex algorithms and data structures required in Javascript is certainly within the bound of possibility, it would not be easy, and wouldn't be my first choice of implementation technology.
That doesn't happen in the UK, hence the rise in cases of all three diseases in some area - particularly London.
A policy of coercing the public into any kind of medical intervention here is very unpopular. Unfortunately when we're up against highly misleading reporting of science and health scare stories in the popular press, there's not a lot of alternative.
The problem with this approach is that in practice not all parents get round to taking their children to the doctor's for each of these separate vaccinations - even worse if several doses are required for full immunity. Net result is a significant proportion of children who are not fully vaccinated. Once again we balance the vanishingly small (and as of yet unproven) risk associated with vaccination against the risk of death or long-term side effects of Measles, Mumps and Rubella.
Indeed. There have a succession of botched public projects that EDS has been involved in. Usually for public sector customers. However, EDS's competitors seem manage to screw them up frequently as well.
A few years ago I was attending a Software Project Management training course at Learning Tree. As always at public courses, there is a diverse range of attendees, with at least a few of them coming from an IT outsourcing company such as EDS, Crapita or another of their ilk.
On this occasion two attendees were from EDS, and it was just about the time that the Inland Revenue's ASPIRE project (which EDS was the supplier of) had been cancelled by the UK government due to severe screw-ups that resulted in tax credits for millions of tax-payers being calculated incorrectly. [1][2]
Fast forward to day two of the course and a long discussion of how and why software projects fail... needless to say the EDS employees kept very quiet.
[1] They still a mess several years later, with overpayments amount to £1billions ever year. [2] I believe EDS got sued in this case too.
I'm convinced that one of the major factors preventing more terrorism outrages is the incompetence of most of the terrorists.
A case in point is the doctor who was involved in the Glasgow Airport and London attacks a few years ago. I'd imagine that basic chemistry is something that a doctors would have got to grips with as a medical student. Clearly not in this case.
Equally, there's the old canard of composers being able to leave their rights as a legacy to their children. I'm hard pressed to see why they ought to be able to.
Sonny Bono's main argument in favour of the Copyright Extension Act hinged on providing a retirement fund for composers. So, it's somewhat ironic that killed himself by wrapping himself around a tree whilst skiing only a few years later.
Cliff Richards acted as a figurehead for a campaign in the UK to lengthen the copyright term on sound recordings [1] using similar arguments. If only...
[1] Very unsuccessfully - not least because some of his recordings were about to go out of copyright and the perception that he already had quite enough money.
The cheque guarantee card was always a very flawed solution to the problem of cheques bouncing. I think in theory to be valid, the retailer had to have had sight of the card and note its number down. In any case, the guarantee was only for transactions under a certain amount - usually £50 for most people.
Surely if you pay for mail order by cheque, the supplier waits for the cheque to clear?
You are labouring under the assumption that cheques are a cheap form of payment for small businesses. They are not, and as volume of cheques in use reduces, it is likely to become increasingly less competitive. I'd hazard a guess that payment by debit card is already a much cheaper way of doing business, and one in which payment is guaranteed (unlike cheques, which might bounce).
The future is almost certain to be mobile card payment terminals of the kind used in restaurants, with a GPRS/3G data connection to the merchant. These are already in common use amongst tradespeople.
If you consider that almost everybody trusted by a UK bank with a cheque book is also issued with a cheque guarantee card - which in almost all cases is some kind of debit card - it's hard to claim that this method of payment is any less available.
However, there are some definite accessibility issues to be addressed for disabled users, but cheques suffered from a different set of these.
To be pedantic, microwave radiation in telecommunication applications has not been proven to be safe, but on the other hand there is little credible evidence to suggest that it is unsafe.
At a rough guess, even though there is dark fiber in roughly the same general area, connecting up the silos - which were built in the middle of nowhere - is still prohibitively expensive.
I also presume that any serious datacentre would want redundant connectively?
The MP who had his moat cleaned on expenses was in fact a member of the Conservative Party - so not the current government, but quite possibly the next one.
The conservatives are at making more reassuring noises about privacy that Labour are - at least at the moment. Whether this remains the case in power is another matter entirely.
Would it ever happen in the US? District heat is surely tantamount to communism?
It's interesting to note that district heat was a quite common at one time in the UK - especially on large local authority housing developments. It fell out of favour in a big way in the 70s and 80s because it wasn't controllable and was seemed to be expensive. In many cases, the schemes were ripped out and replaced with individual gas boilers in each apartment.
Ironically, the record industry's quest for ultimate loudness means that any concerns about the dynamic range of the CD format have evaporated. 96dB is overkill!
When they came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I was not a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
The crucial difference here is that nobody will admit to viewing kiddy pr0n, but the government has already set its sights on extreme and violent porn [although to be fair to the IWF, they apparently want nothing to do filtering this].
Slashdot Mirror
Achieving a rendering of very simple scores such as these is easy, but coping with anything more complex starts becoming a difficult data structures and algorithms problem really quickly, and the layout rule-set becomes increasingly complex in order to handle the myriad corner cases.
What we see here is a great start, it demonstrates that it's possible to render music symbols in HTML canvas, but it's very far from being a complete music typesetting solution that can take an arbitrary description of a score and produces rendered output, which is the impression conveyed to many of those commenting here.
The data model of the score in the example is generated programmatically (it takes up about 1/3 of the javascript file) and is fairly simplistic. This is an important consideration as the only sane way to create and edit scores is with a graphic editor of some kind, such as Sibelius, Finale, Notion or a bunch of open source alternatives.
Increasingly the de-facto interchange format for these is MusicXML, however MusicXML is largely a semantically oriented description of the score with optional positional data rather than a presentation-oriented one. Indeed, if a presentation oriented description is what you required, you might as well use SVG to start with.
Generally the approach one would take would be to convert the MusicXML data model into a presentation oriented one, applying layout rules as you go.
The small amount of layout logic here is very simplistic. Things become much more difficult when multi-stave scores, paging, line-breaking and justification, slurs and so on. I'd would also suggest that whilst implementing the complex algorithms and data structures required in Javascript is certainly within the bound of possibility, it would not be easy, and wouldn't be my first choice of implementation technology.
That doesn't happen in the UK, hence the rise in cases of all three diseases in some area - particularly London.
A policy of coercing the public into any kind of medical intervention here is very unpopular. Unfortunately when we're up against highly misleading reporting of science and health scare stories in the popular press, there's not a lot of alternative.
The problem with this approach is that in practice not all parents get round to taking their children to the doctor's for each of these separate vaccinations - even worse if several doses are required for full immunity. Net result is a significant proportion of children who are not fully vaccinated. Once again we balance the vanishingly small (and as of yet unproven) risk associated with vaccination against the risk of death or long-term side effects of Measles, Mumps and Rubella.
Would the government departments that provide most of the business to EDS fare any better if they did it in house though?
Indeed. There have a succession of botched public projects that EDS has been involved in. Usually for public sector customers. However, EDS's competitors seem manage to screw them up frequently as well.
A few years ago I was attending a Software Project Management training course at Learning Tree. As always at public courses, there is a diverse range of attendees, with at least a few of them coming from an IT outsourcing company such as EDS, Crapita or another of their ilk.
On this occasion two attendees were from EDS, and it was just about the time that the Inland Revenue's ASPIRE project (which EDS was the supplier of) had been cancelled by the UK government due to severe screw-ups that resulted in tax credits for millions of tax-payers being calculated incorrectly. [1][2]
Fast forward to day two of the course and a long discussion of how and why software projects fail... needless to say the EDS employees kept very quiet.
[1] They still a mess several years later, with overpayments amount to £1billions ever year.
[2] I believe EDS got sued in this case too.
Any takers for the assumption of innocence here? I thought not.
I'm convinced that one of the major factors preventing more terrorism outrages is the incompetence of most of the terrorists.
A case in point is the doctor who was involved in the Glasgow Airport and London attacks a few years ago. I'd imagine that basic chemistry is something that a doctors would have got to grips with as a medical student. Clearly not in this case.
Hydrogen Peroxide and Chapatti flour again then?
Equally, there's the old canard of composers being able to leave their rights as a legacy to their children. I'm hard pressed to see why they ought to be able to.
Sonny Bono's main argument in favour of the Copyright Extension Act hinged on providing a retirement fund for composers. So, it's somewhat ironic that killed himself by wrapping himself around a tree whilst skiing only a few years later.
Cliff Richards acted as a figurehead for a campaign in the UK to lengthen the copyright term on sound recordings [1] using similar arguments. If only...
[1] Very unsuccessfully - not least because some of his recordings were about to go out of copyright and the perception that he already had quite enough money.
The cheque guarantee card was always a very flawed solution to the problem of cheques bouncing. I think in theory to be valid, the retailer had to have had sight of the card and note its number down. In any case, the guarantee was only for transactions under a certain amount - usually £50 for most people.
Surely if you pay for mail order by cheque, the supplier waits for the cheque to clear?
You are labouring under the assumption that cheques are a cheap form of payment for small businesses. They are not, and as volume of cheques in use reduces, it is likely to become increasingly less competitive. I'd hazard a guess that payment by debit card is already a much cheaper way of doing business, and one in which payment is guaranteed (unlike cheques, which might bounce).
The future is almost certain to be mobile card payment terminals of the kind used in restaurants, with a GPRS/3G data connection to the merchant. These are already in common use amongst tradespeople.
If you consider that almost everybody trusted by a UK bank with a cheque book is also issued with a cheque guarantee card - which in almost all cases is some kind of debit card - it's hard to claim that this method of payment is any less available.
However, there are some definite accessibility issues to be addressed for disabled users, but cheques suffered from a different set of these.
To be pedantic, microwave radiation in telecommunication applications has not been proven to be safe, but on the other hand there is little credible evidence to suggest that it is unsafe.
At a rough guess, even though there is dark fiber in roughly the same general area, connecting up the silos - which were built in the middle of nowhere - is still prohibitively expensive.
I also presume that any serious datacentre would want redundant connectively?
Indeed. Mixing units is always a world of pain. So why do people still insist on doing it?
The MP who had his moat cleaned on expenses was in fact a member of the Conservative Party - so not the current government, but quite possibly the next one.
The conservatives are at making more reassuring noises about privacy that Labour are - at least at the moment. Whether this remains the case in power is another matter entirely.
Never in any field of human endeavour have so many posted so often about so little of value to be read by so few.
How on earth would Apple make any kind of return on Twitter?
Would it ever happen in the US? District heat is surely tantamount to communism?
It's interesting to note that district heat was a quite common at one time in the UK - especially on large local authority housing developments. It fell out of favour in a big way in the 70s and 80s because it wasn't controllable and was seemed to be expensive.
In many cases, the schemes were ripped out and replaced with individual gas boilers in each apartment.
Seems we're coming full circle.
Ironically, the record industry's quest for ultimate loudness means that any concerns about the dynamic range of the CD format have evaporated. 96dB is overkill!
When they came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
The crucial difference here is that nobody will admit to viewing kiddy pr0n, but the government has already set its sights on extreme and violent porn [although to be fair to the IWF, they apparently want nothing to do filtering this].