Re:Lego was not the ultimate do-it-yourself playth
on
Has Lego Sold Out?
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· Score: 2
Moreover, Meccano taught important lessons that Lego could not: understanding engineering tolerances. Lego bricks just snap together, and unless you are building something pretty infeasible that's generally the end of it. Meccano was all about lining up plates and brackets by eye (the holes were bigger than the screws), making sure things weren't too loose or too tight, ensuring that load-bearing parts were properly cross-braced, and so on.
On the other hand, Meccano was pretty perishable. It didn't take long to scrape the paint off the parts and permanently mangle the so-called flexible plates.
Age: 50. Current status: learning OpenGL and Clojure.
I very much doubt I'd get good shot at a commercial programming gig, but I'm really not interested in that game any more, and yes, 25-year-olds have much more enthusiasm for the agencies' screening questions than I do. (So, I also have the "bad attitude.")
My advice is to both specialise and diversify. Identify particular skills that set you apart from the crowd, but also identify as many of those skills as you can. I'm holding down gigs as composer/sound artist, workshop tutor, media artist and writer: the OpenGL is for large-scale outdoor video artworks while the Clojure is for thread-safe audio/visual performance systems in MaxMSP.
I'll half-grant you the webpages point, although you need a server to run your "program", and I wouldn't want a software system that wouldn't work in a train tunnel, or in a theatre space, or cost an arm and a leg when overseas.
Apps have to be approved by Apple unless you have a developer licence or a jailbroken machine - that's hardly a convenient programming environment.
...I have a disk platter from (I think) an ICL 475, mid-70's vintage. I remember that the motors for the drive heads were the size of cylinders in a medium-size car. This technology was, compared to the IBM, a marvel of miniaturisation: one platter held a full ten megabytes. The platter is, however, about 2.5 feet in diameter.
I think that at least some of the blame can be placed with those recording/mastering engineers who insist on working with visual waveform displays. It's oh-so-easy to get seduced into working with what appears on screen, rather than actually listening to what's coming out of the speakers, and the height of the waveform becomes the metric by which audio levels are set.
The best way to mix and master with a computer-based DAW system is to switch the screen off.
At that point, I thought that he was disappointed that EMI would be publishing music without draconian DRM, and that this was the reason why he ended his relationship with them.
Sir Paul: I'm sick of this scene of corporate greed, market-driven business plans, aggressive practices and monopolistic behaviour, always pushing out the little guy and the independent ventures. That's why I've signed with Starbucks.
I would need to check, but I believe that iSync provides address and calendar conduits - so the Palm HotSync machinery is still used into iCal/Address Book, but the Palm Desktop is bypassed. At least, this is the way it works with my Tungsten.
I have Missing Sync on my shopping list - it seems to provide enough extras (such as tunnelled Internet access for the Palm via Bluetooth) to be worth the cash.
I have a shortlist of requirements which, to me, are pretty simple, but which seem to be confounding the mobile phone industry:
a decent-ish qwerty-like keyboard
simple spreadsheet/database/document apps as well as calendar/address book
compatibility with Mac iSync
no vendor or application lock-in
I was looking at the Nokia Communicator machines (9300i particularly), only to see them withdrawn from the market the week I attempted to order one. Since I want a Windows Mobile device like I want a hole in the head, all that's left is the Treo.
I'm not a great fan of Palm OS - in particular, I've never liked the handwriting recognition and the stylus interface - but I'm hoping that a qwerty-enabled Treo will address points (i)...(iv) for a while, until we get to see how the iPhone works out (hint: wait for second generation, people), or until Nokia get their new communicator platform (E90) up and running.
But: I'm British, so of course I mourn the Psion Organiser; I would so love to see a small, modern, equivalent.
I've used one briefly; doing the VST-over-VNC thing was a bit painful, but it seemed to work well enough. Certainly, there's a lot to be said for having a rugged rackmount box with all the connectors onboard.
But at least his lifespan reached beyond column 80.
Re:Am I the only one who found MySpace's tech supp
on
The Man Behind MySpace
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· Score: 1
... actually good?
I suspect it's just you...
I had a MySpace page for a while: a band page, with uploaded music, album shots, stuff like that.
One day, it just vanished: deleted, removed.
I emailed MySpace support asking what had happened: robot reply, telling me what to do if I'd forgotten my password.
I emailed them again: robot reply, telling me what to do if I wanted to delete my account.
I emailed them again: robot reply, claiming that, if the account was removed, it was for violation of terms and conditions, which is somewhat ludicrous (and I had read the T's & C's).
I also told them that some of my friend accounts now had a mismatch in the number of friends linked to their pages, since mine had disappeared. No reply.
So: they're clearly not doing support at all, as one can tell by the proportion of the site that appears to be nonfunctional at any one time. (Music playback is currently totally broken.) I would certainly recommend that any prospective user doesn't put too much time and effort into uploading content, since MySpace seem happy to just delete it all for no reason. Oh, and they can't restore anything once that's done.
Surely, if Unix was a stable and standardised API
on
What is UNIX, Anyway?
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· Score: 1
(I worked on the audio masking algorithms for prototypes of this system. It's pretty much all written in Max/MSP. Here's a shot of the prototype rigs.)
go to www.apple.com
click on Mac Mini
click "Buy".
This gets you a sweet little desktop machine for doing iTunes, reading mail, browsing the web, and running other OS X apps. It doesn't get you a Linux-based firewall/router, or a mail exchanger, or a small RAID fileserver, and it only gets you a portable database server or J2EE engine with a fair amount of work. Oh, and it's not at all expandable, whereas there are two-ether-port mini-ITX boards and a lot of the small cases will take a PCI card. Using a Mac remotely is a pain, too, since you're basically stuck with VNC. And you're left with a machine which Apple controls (in terms of OS features, updates and fixes), rather than one which you control.
I have a Mac mini here, and it's a sweet little client machine. For a client desktop, I'd recommend it. But I have two (soon to be three) mini-ITX boxes for the infrastructure stuff. It all depends on the role you need a small machine for.
Concurrency is the next major revolution in how we write software
...as we've been saying for, oh, at least the last 20 years, which is about the time I was writing up my Ph.D. thesis on concurrent languages and hardware.
As far as I can see (being slightly out of the language/computer design area these days), concurrent machines and languages aren't taking off for the same reasons they didn't take off in the 1980's:
Implicitly concurrent languages (ones where the concurrency comes for free) are either next to useless (since they tend not to have state, and have problems with a stateful world containing things like, oh, I/O), or end up not being very concurrent at all once they're running;
Explicitly concurrent languages (ones with concurrency constructs) are tricky to program with, and debug, if you're trying to exploit the concurrency; shared memory (tricky at the hardware level) gives you multithreading, otherwise you're into the process world with very little in terms of shared objects etc.
Concurrent hardware tends to have wacky constraints in order to operate with any degree of efficiency (Inmos Transputer anyone?) and is, again, a pain to program;
The fancy concurrent hardware is custom-built, and by the time the boffins have built a concurrent machine that runs reliably based around processors of speed X, delivering concurrency of degree Y, Moore's Law dictates that you can go to your local computer store and buy a $1000 PC with processor speed greater than X * Y.
There's more than a handful of generalisations there, but in short: Moore's Law means that nobody is going to buy a highly concurrent computer when consumer PC's are still getting faster, and the people who really need high parallelism (modellers and the like) have their own special-purpose toys to work with.
A year or two ago I was commissioned to do a soundtrack for a choreographer in Istanbul, and I put the whole thing together around a time-stretched (factor of 10) recording of the choreographer reading aloud in Turkish from a rather dry techical print article on botany. Curiously, when the time-stretch revealed the tones which, in ordinary speech, pass by too quickly to be recognised, lots of the tone sequences fell into triad and scale runs. If you listen to the piece, there's a clear major-triad sequence right at the beginning; in real time, it occurs in less than a fifth of a second.
Slashdot Mirror
Moreover, Meccano taught important lessons that Lego could not: understanding engineering tolerances. Lego bricks just snap together, and unless you are building something pretty infeasible that's generally the end of it. Meccano was all about lining up plates and brackets by eye (the holes were bigger than the screws), making sure things weren't too loose or too tight, ensuring that load-bearing parts were properly cross-braced, and so on.
On the other hand, Meccano was pretty perishable. It didn't take long to scrape the paint off the parts and permanently mangle the so-called flexible plates.
Age: 50. Current status: learning OpenGL and Clojure.
I very much doubt I'd get good shot at a commercial programming gig, but I'm really not interested in that game any more, and yes, 25-year-olds have much more enthusiasm for the agencies' screening questions than I do. (So, I also have the "bad attitude.")
My advice is to both specialise and diversify. Identify particular skills that set you apart from the crowd, but also identify as many of those skills as you can. I'm holding down gigs as composer/sound artist, workshop tutor, media artist and writer: the OpenGL is for large-scale outdoor video artworks while the Clojure is for thread-safe audio/visual performance systems in MaxMSP.
I'm too young to remember the Mercury missions, but do remember the Mercury capsule as an iconic feature of something I'd just missed...
"[...] As a child I assembled a puzzle of the Challenger [...]"
Huh - as a child, *I* watched Neil Armstrong walking on the moon...
I'll half-grant you the webpages point, although you need a server to run your "program", and I wouldn't want a software system that wouldn't work in a train tunnel, or in a theatre space, or cost an arm and a leg when overseas.
Apps have to be approved by Apple unless you have a developer licence or a jailbroken machine - that's hardly a convenient programming environment.
Users were allowed to program the Osborne - it had a built-in programming language interpreter. iPad? Verboten.
... Tara Fitzgerald.
Pix: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cassiel-com/sets/72157622557842760/
...I have a disk platter from (I think) an ICL 475, mid-70's vintage. I remember that the motors for the drive heads were the size of cylinders in a medium-size car. This technology was, compared to the IBM, a marvel of miniaturisation: one platter held a full ten megabytes. The platter is, however, about 2.5 feet in diameter.
I think that at least some of the blame can be placed with those recording/mastering engineers who insist on working with visual waveform displays. It's oh-so-easy to get seduced into working with what appears on screen, rather than actually listening to what's coming out of the speakers, and the height of the waveform becomes the metric by which audio levels are set.
The best way to mix and master with a computer-based DAW system is to switch the screen off.
Or maybe it was because EMI is now dead.
Sir Paul: I'm sick of this scene of corporate greed, market-driven business plans, aggressive practices and monopolistic behaviour, always pushing out the little guy and the independent ventures. That's why I've signed with Starbucks.
I would need to check, but I believe that iSync provides address and calendar conduits - so the Palm HotSync machinery is still used into iCal/Address Book, but the Palm Desktop is bypassed. At least, this is the way it works with my Tungsten.
I have Missing Sync on my shopping list - it seems to provide enough extras (such as tunnelled Internet access for the Palm via Bluetooth) to be worth the cash.
I have a shortlist of requirements which, to me, are pretty simple, but which seem to be confounding the mobile phone industry:
I was looking at the Nokia Communicator machines (9300i particularly), only to see them withdrawn from the market the week I attempted to order one. Since I want a Windows Mobile device like I want a hole in the head, all that's left is the Treo.
I'm not a great fan of Palm OS - in particular, I've never liked the handwriting recognition and the stylus interface - but I'm hoping that a qwerty-enabled Treo will address points (i)...(iv) for a while, until we get to see how the iPhone works out (hint: wait for second generation, people), or until Nokia get their new communicator platform (E90) up and running.
But: I'm British, so of course I mourn the Psion Organiser; I would so love to see a small, modern, equivalent.
...a dedicated Linux-based VST host: http://www.museresearch.com/receptor.php .
I've used one briefly; doing the VST-over-VNC thing was a bit painful, but it seemed to work well enough. Certainly, there's a lot to be said for having a rugged rackmount box with all the connectors onboard.
Meanwhile, I lost a bet. My money was on either Stargate:Miami or Stargate:NY.
But at least his lifespan reached beyond column 80.
I suspect it's just you...
I had a MySpace page for a while: a band page, with uploaded music, album shots, stuff like that.
One day, it just vanished: deleted, removed.
I emailed MySpace support asking what had happened: robot reply, telling me what to do if I'd forgotten my password.
I emailed them again: robot reply, telling me what to do if I wanted to delete my account.
I emailed them again: robot reply, claiming that, if the account was removed, it was for violation of terms and conditions, which is somewhat ludicrous (and I had read the T's & C's).
I also told them that some of my friend accounts now had a mismatch in the number of friends linked to their pages, since mine had disappeared. No reply.
So: they're clearly not doing support at all, as one can tell by the proportion of the site that appears to be nonfunctional at any one time. (Music playback is currently totally broken.) I would certainly recommend that any prospective user doesn't put too much time and effort into uploading content, since MySpace seem happy to just delete it all for no reason. Oh, and they can't restore anything once that's done.
...we, erm, wouldn't need Autoconf?
Thunderbird 2... then I'll be able to turn up with Thunderbird 4, the Mole, or Firefly. The slow speed, backwards wings and Ford Cortina steering wheel are only minor drawbacks.
(I worked on the audio masking algorithms for prototypes of this system. It's pretty much all written in Max/MSP. Here's a shot of the prototype rigs.)
click on Mac Mini
click "Buy".
This gets you a sweet little desktop machine for doing iTunes, reading mail, browsing the web, and running other OS X apps. It doesn't get you a Linux-based firewall/router, or a mail exchanger, or a small RAID fileserver, and it only gets you a portable database server or J2EE engine with a fair amount of work. Oh, and it's not at all expandable, whereas there are two-ether-port mini-ITX boards and a lot of the small cases will take a PCI card. Using a Mac remotely is a pain, too, since you're basically stuck with VNC. And you're left with a machine which Apple controls (in terms of OS features, updates and fixes), rather than one which you control.
I have a Mac mini here, and it's a sweet little client machine. For a client desktop, I'd recommend it. But I have two (soon to be three) mini-ITX boxes for the infrastructure stuff. It all depends on the role you need a small machine for.
...as we've been saying for, oh, at least the last 20 years, which is about the time I was writing up my Ph.D. thesis on concurrent languages and hardware.
As far as I can see (being slightly out of the language/computer design area these days), concurrent machines and languages aren't taking off for the same reasons they didn't take off in the 1980's:
There's more than a handful of generalisations there, but in short: Moore's Law means that nobody is going to buy a highly concurrent computer when consumer PC's are still getting faster, and the people who really need high parallelism (modellers and the like) have their own special-purpose toys to work with.
A year or two ago I was commissioned to do a soundtrack for a choreographer in Istanbul, and I put the whole thing together around a time-stretched (factor of 10) recording of the choreographer reading aloud in Turkish from a rather dry techical print article on botany. Curiously, when the time-stretch revealed the tones which, in ordinary speech, pass by too quickly to be recognised, lots of the tone sequences fell into triad and scale runs. If you listen to the piece, there's a clear major-triad sequence right at the beginning; in real time, it occurs in less than a fifth of a second.