My biggest complaint about the current Zaurus is that the screen is too narrow; emails and web pages don't format well to it. For better or worse, we live in an 80-column world, and I'd like to see some screenshots of the '700 doing some "real-world" web pages or some text files.
(I'm running the Crow ROM on my Zaurus, which lets me put/home onto an SD card and get 64Mb as application RAM; can the '700 do something similar?)
Eiffel is a very underrated language in the free software community for some strange reason..
One possible reason might be (correct me if I'm wrong) that for a long time, Eiffel was supported by a single vendor with a closed-source, commercial, proprietary compiler. Who is going to commit to a brand new programming language with a single vendor?
From this point of view, an open-source compiler is ideal. Perl and Python are effectively single-vendor (i.e. single development team) but at no risk.
Aside: at the time (commercial) Eiffel first appeared, we were working on a Standard ML language and compiler (in fact there were several different development teams building compilers, since the language had a formal semantics and definition). The New Jersey compiler was open-source from the start (around, oh, 1987?), and was self-compiling, generating native code for 680x0, Alpha, Vax and Mips architectures.
This was around the time that OO programming was getting trendy, and SML, despite being very-high-level, strongly-typed, memory-managed, having a superb modules system etc., wasn't really OO and so fell out of fashion. It's still around, though, and still being developed (see the link above).
Actually, it's just as well the data was on videodisc rather than DVD. Otherwise, think of all the work that would have done on the emulator, only to arrive at the message
Yes, I *know* that Bill told you last month that security was our absolute number one priority here at Microsoft. That was last month. This month, destroying Open Source is our absolute number one priority. Open Source threatens our revenue stream, whereas nobody cares about security - we can just bolt that on later if we need to.
...is with long tracks. Its 32Mb of cache isn't cache in the obvious sense: it imposes a limit on song length. At a standard encoding rate, the iPod stumbles and spins its disk up every 16 minutes. (Guess who's re-ripping their CD's at 96Kbps just to fit the long tracks on?)
I would be interested to know whether the Nomad gets this right... or does everyone simply have to listen to pop music?
The crossfade feature has always been a hack, and has always sounded dreadful. Thanks for the pointer to the track merging in iTunes 3, though: I didn't notice that at first, and will definitely try it out.
From what I read in the iTunes 3.0 release notes, it still can't handle CD's where the music seamlessly spans multiple tracks. I'm getting sick of ripping CD tracks into Digital Performer and doing digital mixdowns just so I can get MP3's without gaps in the audio.
Sound cards: MOTU do a nice range of Firewire-enabled boxes, including 24-bit 96KHz stuff; we used one at Ballett Frankfurt, plugged into a Pismo PowerBook. If you want an internal mixer (which is essential for zero-latency monitoring) then go for RME's HammerFall stuff, which comes as CardBus for laptops; we have a pile of them here, driven from G4 TiBooks. I believe both product ranges can be driven from PCI cards, for desktop solutions. My home studio uses a couple of Korg OasysPCI cards, which offer 24-bit sound at 44.1 or 48K, and do internal MIDI-controllable mixing/monitoring, plus stunning multi-effects processing and analogue/physical modelling synthesis and sample playback, all for a blowout street price of around $400.
The ProTools rigs sound good (especially the big ones with the hardware-based effects plug-ins), but they're way overpriced and the software is a little messy.
Then again, I was commissioned to compose a piece for a performance festival in Zurich, and ended up buying a Sound Blaster from a market in Istanbul (I love tight deadlines). It sounded a bit crappy compared to what I usually use, not surprisingly, but it did the job. (Look for the piece "Renewal" at MP3.com if you're at all curious; by contrast, the "Diffusion" piece there was done on a big ProTools rig.)
Rubbish. In the ten or fifteen years I've been using audio software on the Mac, practically all of it has been copy-protected. The protection used to be all floppy-disk-based, with special bad sectors to indicate the keys, and this only went out of vogue when Macs ceased to have floppy drives, and then only under protest from the vendors (some of whom, until relatively recently, instructed users to buy USB external floppy drives to authorise their software).
These days, vendors use machine-specific licence keys generated via a challenge/response system. So, you can backup your software against distribution media failure, but you're potentially screwed if you lose the hard disk because any replacement disk will have a different protection key, and you'll need to convince the vendor that, yes, your disk is dead (or that you've upgraded your machine) rather than wanting to give the software to a friend.
The problems with the Psion 5 (and 5mx) are: it's quite large, the screen contrast is dreadful, and Psion aren't making them any more.
Having said that, I'm happy with my 5mx, although the onboard software has suffered a little from the bloat necessary to keep formats consistent with Microsoft. The 3a and 3mx had cleaner, simpler document formats, for example.
Actually, Cubase isn't particularly powerful either, compared to the likes of Performer or Logic. The reason it's so established is that it derives from the old Pro 24 sequencer on the Atari 1040, which made its way into practically every European recording studio in the mid-80's. Steinberg have a long, long-term customer base.
Music software companies are not of the large, well-funded variety: they're usually small (minute compared to mainstream software houses) and often hand-to-mouth. They are very much catering for a precarious niche market (one of the reasons, they'd claim, why music software is still copy-protected) and cannot afford to splash out on time, money and resources porting their products to (and supporting) a niche operating system within that market.
...which, with its built-in copy protection, is marketed as the solution to all these format wars: we all just go and adopt another new format (with the RIAA et al's blessing).
Apparently it still operates as a cash register while running Linux... except that it keeps insisting that anything run through it should be costing $0.00.
Couldn't someone record an MP3 which, when played back on your kitchen table acting as loudspeaker, has the effect of typing on the laser keyboard projected on the table, hacking into your system?
Developers really do need to consider the security implications of their products, especially when making our kitchen furniture smart.
This article is really just a light summary of something that's been going on gradually for about 20 years. The writing was on the wall when Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze appeared with the Crumar GDS and Fairlight CMI in 1980: this is when it became clear that synthesis was really just a software issue, just waiting for cheap (commodity) hardware.
These days it's a religious issue. My personal religion is that the hardware units are always going to be ahead. (I don't mean keyboards or pure MIDI modules specifically; I'm also counting computer-hosted hardware products like the Creamware Pulsar, the Korg OasysPCI, and souped-up breakout boxes like the Kyma Capybara and the Nord MicroModular.) Sure, latency is getting pretty damn tight on the native software, but if you're sharing a processor with Windows or MacOS it's hard to make it predictable. And the plug-in world is plagued with compatibility and reliability problems. The jury is out over sound quality - again, I hold that hardware units sound better because of the dedicated hardware (my OasysPCI, with its five dedicated DSP's and filter/modelling algorithms to match, sounds fabulous, to a degree which native software is not going to match just yet).
Having said all that, I'm a firm believe in computers as audio/MIDI processing tools. I've been using Cycling '74's Max for ten years, and am now doing projects with MSP, the digital audio toolkit portion, most recently a high-profile commission for Ballett Frankfurt, so this stuff can be used in professional contexts. (Nano-plug and disclosure: I reviewed Max/MSP for RECORDING magazine last October, so I had to look at these issues quite closely.)
There are laptop-only performers around, some of whom even write good music, but there's one other area where hardware will win out: laptops have dreadful ADC/DAC hardware so we'll always have external converter boxes.
Epilog: in the Mac world, none of this stuff works under OS X. OS X has a nice audio/MIDI framework but nobody's using it yet (except perhaps EMagic) so we Mac users are sitting in a MacOS 9.2.2 limbo right now.
Adding the Obligatory Slashdot Tagline
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
The classic work of "build/corrupt-it-yourself" electronica is, of course, the Forbidden Planet Soundtrack (1956). As I recall, much of the soundtrack was recordings of the home-made electronic instrumentation being overloaded into destruction.
Slashdot Mirror
(I'm running the Crow ROM on my Zaurus, which lets me put /home onto an SD card and get 64Mb as application RAM; can the '700 do something similar?)
One possible reason might be (correct me if I'm wrong) that for a long time, Eiffel was supported by a single vendor with a closed-source, commercial, proprietary compiler. Who is going to commit to a brand new programming language with a single vendor?
From this point of view, an open-source compiler is ideal. Perl and Python are effectively single-vendor (i.e. single development team) but at no risk.
Aside: at the time (commercial) Eiffel first appeared, we were working on a Standard ML language and compiler (in fact there were several different development teams building compilers, since the language had a formal semantics and definition). The New Jersey compiler was open-source from the start (around, oh, 1987?), and was self-compiling, generating native code for 680x0, Alpha, Vax and Mips architectures.
This was around the time that OO programming was getting trendy, and SML, despite being very-high-level, strongly-typed, memory-managed, having a superb modules system etc., wasn't really OO and so fell out of fashion. It's still around, though, and still being developed (see the link above).
Region Error
Yes, I *know* that Bill told you last month that security was our absolute number one priority here at Microsoft. That was last month. This month, destroying Open Source is our absolute number one priority. Open Source threatens our revenue stream, whereas nobody cares about security - we can just bolt that on later if we need to.
I would be interested to know whether the Nomad gets this right... or does everyone simply have to listen to pop music?
I believe they're having some teething problems with the alternator, but apparently the headlamps and indicators have worked flawlessly.
The crossfade feature has always been a hack, and has always sounded dreadful. Thanks for the pointer to the track merging in iTunes 3, though: I didn't notice that at first, and will definitely try it out.
From what I read in the iTunes 3.0 release notes, it still can't handle CD's where the music seamlessly spans multiple tracks. I'm getting sick of ripping CD tracks into Digital Performer and doing digital mixdowns just so I can get MP3's without gaps in the audio.
...I only want to know when I'll be able to buy a PowerBook made from it.
The Phillips format will win out, of course, just like their Digital Compact Cassette (DCC).
The ProTools rigs sound good (especially the big ones with the hardware-based effects plug-ins), but they're way overpriced and the software is a little messy.
Then again, I was commissioned to compose a piece for a performance festival in Zurich, and ended up buying a Sound Blaster from a market in Istanbul (I love tight deadlines). It sounded a bit crappy compared to what I usually use, not surprisingly, but it did the job. (Look for the piece "Renewal" at MP3.com if you're at all curious; by contrast, the "Diffusion" piece there was done on a big ProTools rig.)
...because of a bug in the JavaScript which prevented the menu selections from working. Clearly this wasn't tested properly.
These days, vendors use machine-specific licence keys generated via a challenge/response system. So, you can backup your software against distribution media failure, but you're potentially screwed if you lose the hard disk because any replacement disk will have a different protection key, and you'll need to convince the vendor that, yes, your disk is dead (or that you've upgraded your machine) rather than wanting to give the software to a friend.
Having said that, I'm happy with my 5mx, although the onboard software has suffered a little from the bloat necessary to keep formats consistent with Microsoft. The 3a and 3mx had cleaner, simpler document formats, for example.
Actually, Cubase isn't particularly powerful either, compared to the likes of Performer or Logic. The reason it's so established is that it derives from the old Pro 24 sequencer on the Atari 1040, which made its way into practically every European recording studio in the mid-80's. Steinberg have a long, long-term customer base.
Music software companies are not of the large, well-funded variety: they're usually small (minute compared to mainstream software houses) and often hand-to-mouth. They are very much catering for a precarious niche market (one of the reasons, they'd claim, why music software is still copy-protected) and cannot afford to splash out on time, money and resources porting their products to (and supporting) a niche operating system within that market.
...which, with its built-in copy protection, is marketed as the solution to all these format wars: we all just go and adopt another new format (with the RIAA et al's blessing).
Isn't it actually .kids.r.us? You know, to go along with .toys.r.us?
...because I get this from the BMW page describing the iDrive:
Tactile feedback
JRun Servlet Error
com.livesoftware.jsp.JSPServlet: java.lang.NullPointerException
Apparently it still operates as a cash register while running Linux... except that it keeps insisting that anything run through it should be costing $0.00.
That doesn't leave much room for the rock...
Developers really do need to consider the security implications of their products, especially when making our kitchen furniture smart.
These days it's a religious issue. My personal religion is that the hardware units are always going to be ahead. (I don't mean keyboards or pure MIDI modules specifically; I'm also counting computer-hosted hardware products like the Creamware Pulsar, the Korg OasysPCI, and souped-up breakout boxes like the Kyma Capybara and the Nord MicroModular.) Sure, latency is getting pretty damn tight on the native software, but if you're sharing a processor with Windows or MacOS it's hard to make it predictable. And the plug-in world is plagued with compatibility and reliability problems. The jury is out over sound quality - again, I hold that hardware units sound better because of the dedicated hardware (my OasysPCI, with its five dedicated DSP's and filter/modelling algorithms to match, sounds fabulous, to a degree which native software is not going to match just yet).
Having said all that, I'm a firm believe in computers as audio/MIDI processing tools. I've been using Cycling '74's Max for ten years, and am now doing projects with MSP, the digital audio toolkit portion, most recently a high-profile commission for Ballett Frankfurt, so this stuff can be used in professional contexts. (Nano-plug and disclosure: I reviewed Max/MSP for RECORDING magazine last October, so I had to look at these issues quite closely.)
There are laptop-only performers around, some of whom even write good music, but there's one other area where hardware will win out: laptops have dreadful ADC/DAC hardware so we'll always have external converter boxes.
Epilog: in the Mac world, none of this stuff works under OS X. OS X has a nice audio/MIDI framework but nobody's using it yet (except perhaps EMagic) so we Mac users are sitting in a MacOS 9.2.2 limbo right now.
"...and what's more, it's running Linux!"
The classic work of "build/corrupt-it-yourself" electronica is, of course, the Forbidden Planet Soundtrack (1956). As I recall, much of the soundtrack was recordings of the home-made electronic instrumentation being overloaded into destruction.