Modelling amplifiers like the Line 6 attempt to digitally reproduce the sound of classic analog amplifiers.
What you get is a sequence of digital slices lined up in a way that mimics the original waveform. The problem is that it sounds grainy and "processed", and its easy to tell the difference between that and the real thing.
The question is, how fine do the slices need to be cut before you can't tell the difference between a series of digital slices and an analog waveform? If not 24-bit tech, what about 128? Maybe it will be too expensive to truly capture analog sounds with digital technology.
This is a real problem, because fewer and fewer companies make tubes any more and there are a lot of us guitar players who still are not satisfied with the way these modelling amps sound.
Perhaps the advent of quantum computing will provide the solution. After all, if something can be both a particle and a wave, then maybe we will have real waveforms to work with in order to create sounds.
The music business is is undeniably a horrible uber-competitive backstabbing industry. Why? Because a) playing music is fun b) people will pay some amount of money to hear music. What results is a bunch of people going to increasingly ridiculous lengths in order to make it in the music industry. A lucky few will make generous amounts of money, while the rest will scramble to survive.
Such is the case in any industry where the work is a lot of fun, and I say this as a warning because the same thing can easily happen to computer programmers. Why? Because programming is a fun and rewarding job, and as soon as the general public figures this out you will have a situation where a) a lucky few get to be paid as programmers b) a lot of programming work gets done for free by the many trying to "make it" in the business. "Oh, but programming is hard", you say. So is being a top-flight musician, and there are plenty of those who have to hump day jobs because there just aren't enough paying positions to support them at what they would like(and are highly qualified) to do.
So while you sit there posting to slashdot, saying "oh well, they can make their money through concerts and selling t-shirts", just remember, the same thing could happen to you one day. Hope you're good at self-promotion. Or that enough people never figure out that programming is fun in a similar way that music is fun. I wouldn't bet on the latter. It doesn't take a genius to coorelate the fact that people already produce a ton of code for free to the speculation that they could get programmers to do their bidding at very generous rates.
MySQL and ODBC work pretty much flawlessly together.
In fact, if you want an "Access-like" front end to MySQL, one thing you can do is (gasp) to use Access.
With a MySQL server sitting somewhere on your network, and MyODBC and MS Access on your client machine, you can link the MySQL tables and be able to use Access queries, forms, modules and macros. I'd love it if there were something like Access in the Open Source world, as I find table and query design faster for most things with a visual tool. But until then, Access works just fine as a front end.
Screw pure capitalism. Unregulated capitalism doesn't work.
Truer words have not been spoken, at least not in this discussion. Capitalism must be regulated to work. It was a point driven over and over again in my macroeconomics course, where we learned repeatedly that only the government, elected by the people, is what is able to enforce a desirable economy - i.e. full employment at fair wages for the vast majority of its citizens. The government is interested in doing so because it needs the tax base and it also needs the votes of those citizens.
Democracy is the antidote to unrestrained capitalism.
Did you read the article? Financial Analysts are also among those being replaced by overseas labor. So what's your plan when you get replaced by two Indians, each better at what they do than you because one is dedicated to financial analysis and the other to perl programming, for $10,000 a year each?
Gonna lower your salary requirements to $20,000 a year? Thats what 'capitalism' demands you do. If you're going to compete on a global level, you have to compete on a global level, salary and all. With people who don't mind living with no running water, dirt floors, and no electricity.
Re:The predicted chain of events according to me
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
Bzzt!
4. Many of which are provided by US corporations.
No, because we don't make anything here any more. And the service centers are being outsourced as well. If its being made by US corporations, the labor is coming from elsewhere.
So substitute wherever else those products and services are being made for USA in everything you wrote after #4.
And add:
10. Middle class erodes to poverty.
11. The poor are reduced to starvation.
12. French-style revolution. Bill Gates and others like him executed by starving mob.
Re:You'll eat shit if you're hungry enough and...
on
How to be a Programmer
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· Score: 1
Please expand on this, and try to post earlier next time. I see the makings of a really good troll here. Good start.
Being able to use a back-propagating learning neural network that reassembles fragmented downloads intelligently and learns bad host IDs is useless to me if I am on a P2P network limited to Rush fans.
Sweet Jesus on a pogo stick, where can I find this network you speak of?
it consists of magnetic pickups, tube amplifiers, and magnetic speakers.
take any one of these out of the loop and replace it with something else(solid state amps, modelling amps, guitar synthesizers, anything that digitizes the sound) and it becomes something else. An approximation at best.
Why do the latest and greatest digital modelling amps all brag about the 50's and 60's era tube amps they emulate? Is it because they found a better way to reproduce the sound of the guitar transmitted through those magnetic pickups? No. Its because the old tube amps sound better. Find me a single tube amp that claims to sound like a Line 6 and I will eat my post.
Its not just one element, its the entire system. Magnetism interacts with electricity. The pickups, tubes and speakers work together to make a pleasing tone, and nothing can change or "improve" that equation. You might as well talk about a system that runs an acoustic guitar through a series of A/D and D/A converters to produce a "better" sound. Not going to happen. An acoustic guitar is an acoustic guitar. What we know and love as the electric guitar, again, is magnets, tubes and electricity. Change that and you have something else entirely.
having gone through the motions of this, both at a "real" studio, and with home equipment, the actual cost of making a CD has several factors that can vary widely:
a) Musical equipment. Not cheap. Many unknown musicians think nothing about having 5-20 thousand dollars worth of equipment. Multiply that by the number of musicians in the band. OTOH, a $150 used MIM(made in Mexico) Fender strat played through a $100 amp will convincingly duplicate the "Nirvana" guitar sound.
b) Studio Time. If a band is skilled enough, they can produce their records in a home studio. You could feasibly do this with one microphone plugged into the back of a sound card, record one track at a time, and mix it down with some program you downloaded off alt.binaries.whatever. Or you could spend more money. Or you could spend a lot more money.
b2) You could hire out a studio and an engineer, and a producer, and this is where it really can get expensive. It would not be much of a problem to blow through 500 grand if you hired a couple of name brand guys and spent a month or two in an expensive studio.
So, does it cost $500,000 to record a CD? It can. It can be done for much less. And if you have some geeks at your disposable who know something about audio engineering, you could conceivably even get a high quality record for a small fraction of what some rich rock star is going to blow through making an album.
Re:MS works fine, you just don't know how to use i
on
Apache 2.0.44 Released
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· Score: 1
I had my server running 100% for 46 days
While that is quite an accomplishment, its nothing for a Unix server to have that kind of uptime.
However, you almost certainly ran a security risk by keeping IIS up that long. I have Win2K pro on my desktop, and with Windows Update pulling down security updates automatically, I certainly don't remember a period where 46 days went by with out a security flaw - that needed to be patched - that required a reboot.
If you're keeping your server patch you're really looking at a week's uptime between reboots, on average.
Its more stable than Win9x to be sure, but thats not saying much. Windwos still has a long way to go before it really makes a decent server.
Way back when I did CS2...99% of the student didn't use a debugger
Well, being a somewhat experienced programmer who decided to go back to school and finish my degree - I agree with you, most students haven't bothered to learn how to use a debugger.
BUT...I did a few programming projects with some friends of mine and I showed them how much easier it was to follow what was going on with a debugger. It was like a light turned on for them. And they were thankful for the hours of work it saved them.
I'd have to believe that if nothing else learning how to debug would save lots of hair being pulled out by CS students. Especially those little errors like a variable going out of scope or a line or two of code that is in the wrong place - a debugger will help you catch those types of things immediately, whereas even with the print statements you still might take a while before you catch those types of things.
Strategically embedded print statements - the time-honored way to find bugs.
Doesn't work very well with recursive functions. Especially recursive functions that call other recursive functions. Ever tried to write a recursive descent parser? Next to impossible without a good debugger. You need to be able to step through the code line by line and watch variables as they are loaded on to(and popped off) the stack. No way are print statements going to be nearly as helpful.
Well that STL guru might find himself unemployed and having to get a job programming Java or C#. Problem is, he won't have the right buzzwords on his resume and won't get the job, even if he is a brilliant programmer.
Except that they aren't $3,000 as originally promised, they are $5,000.
Once the initial price-gouging subsides, I see these things becoming very popular.
Anything to get us fat lazy Americans farther away from having to do anything physical is going to succeed. The Segway does a fantastic job of doing just that. (Hell, when I finished watching The Matrix the first time, my initial impression was, well isn't that what we're all working toward anyway?)
Well, I wasn't necessarily making the point that people should hire people who know only the concepts but not the languages, but that they shouldn't do the reverse(hire people who know the languages but not the concepts) And I still believe its the concepts that are the most important thing as a result of having learned several languages.
Another Spolsky article points out the dangers of say, someone who knows Visual Basic, but doesn't know how to get around its limitations. Yes, you should know the language and the API's you are working with. But you should also know whats going on under the hood.
Why do specific languages seem to be more important to employers than CS concepts. Someone with a good background in CS should be able to work in a number of languages and be able to pick up new ones quickly.
Seems to me its more important to know algorithms, data structures, how to implement parsers, how to optimize databases(or knowing when its better to use a custom data structure rather than a database), etc.
But the job ads almost universally ask for knowledge of the specific language. I've worked with C++, Java, VB, Perl, SQL, XML, Javascript, and others, but in my experience knowing what to do with these languages far outweighs knowing the language itself. Why don't recruiters see this?
Its nice of the AFL-CIO to take a stand for us largely non-unionized geeks. It used to be the prevailing wisdom was, the manufacturing jobs would be replaced by computer jobs, so if you lost your job at GM, with some retraining you could work in IT. Perhaps thats why they are taking up this issue?
Its too bad there isn't the level of unionization in the IT industry as there is in other trades and professions. Only in a booming economy do you(individually) have any real bargaining power with big corporations. In today's market, a widespread union would be a big help. The practice of hiring cheap foreign labor and shipping jobs overseas is quite damaging to our social fabric, and I would think would dissuade those who are considering entering the field. A union could make sure corporations are hiring qualified individuals within the community before looking outside for help.
The statement you make on environment does not match your conclusions and is in and case demonstrably false.
Actually I think you just agreed with what I said, which was that social factors(i.e. upbringing, wealth, social status), rather than the environment had more to do with where a person ended up in life. I meant environment in the biological sense - we all breath the same air, eat food grown in the same soil, etc. The difference in the "environment" of a rich kid and a poor kid is entirely a social construct.
The only way to get a "chemistry set" that doesn't have plastic beakers and anything more fun than baking soda and vinegar is to get an old one made in the 50's or 60's. My old roommate found lots of good stuff on Ebay.
Another good source of chemicals are some of the fertilizers you can get at a local nursery. If you have a good local nursery you can find things like ammonium nitrate, phosphoric acid, sulfur, etc. Professional growers often need to mix specific fertilizer "recipes" with these ingredients, which happen to have lots of other uses besides growing plants.
Sorry, but I just can't resist picking on such an obviously brilliant student from the worlds finest university.
First of all, the gentleman you replied to did do some research - he quoted a report done by the U.S. News and World Report, while you merely pulled a figure out of your head. FYI, this is what Harvard has to say about the average SAT score of those admitted:
Harvard does not have clearly defined, required minimum scores; however, the majority of student admitted to the College represent a range of scores from roughly 600 to 800 on each section of the SAT I as well as on the SAT II Subject Tests.
So the average is somewhere between 1200 and 1600 for the majority of their students. 2/3 of their students is still a majority.
Second, from what you just said, I think you have either never taken a course in biology or genetics or you are in dire need of a refresher. There is (significantly) less than 1% of a genetic difference between you and anyone else on this planet. And what you would call "environment" is largely constructed from the status quo. There is very little difference, environmentally speaking, between the richest and the poorest Amercians experience.
Your post actually went a long way toward proving that socio-economic factors far outweigh brains and talent when it comes to getting into elite institutions like Harvard.
We've had a display of Aqua Erotica in our bookstore since it was published, over two years ago. For some reason, I thought the goldfish bowl was our idea(our display looks exactly like the one in this picture), but apparently not.
Seeing as we've sold about two of these per month in the last couple of years, I'd hardly call this a revolution in publishing. Really, it just seems like another gimmick.
With all the hoopla over e-books and print-on-demand books, both of which are better and more innovative ideas than the aqua book, they represent a small fraction of what people actually buy. I happen to prefer computer books in the electronic format, such as the O'Reilly bookshelves, but I'm in the distinct minority. Most people have a definite preference for the dead tree version, and thats something I don't see changing for a long time.
any competent Windows admin could make any W2K machine as stable as any other *nix.
For the simple reason that you need to reboot every time Microsoft comes out with a security patch. I have Windows Update turned on on my desktop machine and every week there is a new security flaw.
Therefore, to keep an internet connected Windows machine "secure", you are talking weekly reboots. Most of us here consider uptime to be the best indicator of stability, and Windows is a far cry from being the most stable system.
Now, its true there have been security holes found in Linux(about 1/4 the frequency of Windows). But at least you don't have to reboot every time you patch something, unless its the kernel. Most patches are on a higher level subsystem that simply needs to be HUP'ed to begin running the patched code. Not so with Windows.
You unfortunately seem to have confused the desirability of running a Windows desktop system with that of running a server. Depending on what kind of server you are talking about(web, email, DNS, firewall, etc.) Microsoft is nowhere near being the most popular, and its because Unix and Linux servers have proven to be more stable and more secure than their Linux counterparts. And they always will be because ease of use is anathema to security and stability.
A competent admin doesn't need a GUI for these servers, in fact a GUI is just a large chunk of code that gets in the way of what these servers need to do.
Slashdot Mirror
What you get is a sequence of digital slices lined up in a way that mimics the original waveform. The problem is that it sounds grainy and "processed", and its easy to tell the difference between that and the real thing.
The question is, how fine do the slices need to be cut before you can't tell the difference between a series of digital slices and an analog waveform? If not 24-bit tech, what about 128? Maybe it will be too expensive to truly capture analog sounds with digital technology.
This is a real problem, because fewer and fewer companies make tubes any more and there are a lot of us guitar players who still are not satisfied with the way these modelling amps sound.
Perhaps the advent of quantum computing will provide the solution. After all, if something can be both a particle and a wave, then maybe we will have real waveforms to work with in order to create sounds.
The music business is is undeniably a horrible uber-competitive backstabbing industry. Why? Because a) playing music is fun b) people will pay some amount of money to hear music. What results is a bunch of people going to increasingly ridiculous lengths in order to make it in the music industry. A lucky few will make generous amounts of money, while the rest will scramble to survive.
Such is the case in any industry where the work is a lot of fun, and I say this as a warning because the same thing can easily happen to computer programmers. Why? Because programming is a fun and rewarding job, and as soon as the general public figures this out you will have a situation where a) a lucky few get to be paid as programmers b) a lot of programming work gets done for free by the many trying to "make it" in the business. "Oh, but programming is hard", you say. So is being a top-flight musician, and there are plenty of those who have to hump day jobs because there just aren't enough paying positions to support them at what they would like(and are highly qualified) to do.
So while you sit there posting to slashdot, saying "oh well, they can make their money through concerts and selling t-shirts", just remember, the same thing could happen to you one day. Hope you're good at self-promotion. Or that enough people never figure out that programming is fun in a similar way that music is fun. I wouldn't bet on the latter. It doesn't take a genius to coorelate the fact that people already produce a ton of code for free to the speculation that they could get programmers to do their bidding at very generous rates.
Rather than trying to contact my twelve year old self, I'm making every effort to contact my fifty year old self and get his advice.
In fact, if you want an "Access-like" front end to MySQL, one thing you can do is (gasp) to use Access.
With a MySQL server sitting somewhere on your network, and MyODBC and MS Access on your client machine, you can link the MySQL tables and be able to use Access queries, forms, modules and macros. I'd love it if there were something like Access in the Open Source world, as I find table and query design faster for most things with a visual tool. But until then, Access works just fine as a front end.
Truer words have not been spoken, at least not in this discussion. Capitalism must be regulated to work. It was a point driven over and over again in my macroeconomics course, where we learned repeatedly that only the government, elected by the people, is what is able to enforce a desirable economy - i.e. full employment at fair wages for the vast majority of its citizens. The government is interested in doing so because it needs the tax base and it also needs the votes of those citizens.
Democracy is the antidote to unrestrained capitalism.
Gonna lower your salary requirements to $20,000 a year? Thats what 'capitalism' demands you do. If you're going to compete on a global level, you have to compete on a global level, salary and all. With people who don't mind living with no running water, dirt floors, and no electricity.
4. Many of which are provided by US corporations.
No, because we don't make anything here any more. And the service centers are being outsourced as well. If its being made by US corporations, the labor is coming from elsewhere.
So substitute wherever else those products and services are being made for USA in everything you wrote after #4.
And add:
10. Middle class erodes to poverty.
11. The poor are reduced to starvation.
12. French-style revolution. Bill Gates and others like him executed by starving mob.
Please expand on this, and try to post earlier next time. I see the makings of a really good troll here. Good start.
Sweet Jesus on a pogo stick, where can I find this network you speak of?
take any one of these out of the loop and replace it with something else(solid state amps, modelling amps, guitar synthesizers, anything that digitizes the sound) and it becomes something else. An approximation at best.
Why do the latest and greatest digital modelling amps all brag about the 50's and 60's era tube amps they emulate? Is it because they found a better way to reproduce the sound of the guitar transmitted through those magnetic pickups? No. Its because the old tube amps sound better. Find me a single tube amp that claims to sound like a Line 6 and I will eat my post.
Its not just one element, its the entire system. Magnetism interacts with electricity. The pickups, tubes and speakers work together to make a pleasing tone, and nothing can change or "improve" that equation. You might as well talk about a system that runs an acoustic guitar through a series of A/D and D/A converters to produce a "better" sound. Not going to happen. An acoustic guitar is an acoustic guitar. What we know and love as the electric guitar, again, is magnets, tubes and electricity. Change that and you have something else entirely.
a) Musical equipment. Not cheap. Many unknown musicians think nothing about having 5-20 thousand dollars worth of equipment. Multiply that by the number of musicians in the band. OTOH, a $150 used MIM(made in Mexico) Fender strat played through a $100 amp will convincingly duplicate the "Nirvana" guitar sound.
b) Studio Time. If a band is skilled enough, they can produce their records in a home studio. You could feasibly do this with one microphone plugged into the back of a sound card, record one track at a time, and mix it down with some program you downloaded off alt.binaries.whatever. Or you could spend more money. Or you could spend a lot more money.
b2) You could hire out a studio and an engineer, and a producer, and this is where it really can get expensive. It would not be much of a problem to blow through 500 grand if you hired a couple of name brand guys and spent a month or two in an expensive studio.
So, does it cost $500,000 to record a CD? It can. It can be done for much less. And if you have some geeks at your disposable who know something about audio engineering, you could conceivably even get a high quality record for a small fraction of what some rich rock star is going to blow through making an album.
While that is quite an accomplishment, its nothing for a Unix server to have that kind of uptime.
However, you almost certainly ran a security risk by keeping IIS up that long. I have Win2K pro on my desktop, and with Windows Update pulling down security updates automatically, I certainly don't remember a period where 46 days went by with out a security flaw - that needed to be patched - that required a reboot.
If you're keeping your server patch you're really looking at a week's uptime between reboots, on average.
Its more stable than Win9x to be sure, but thats not saying much. Windwos still has a long way to go before it really makes a decent server.
Well, being a somewhat experienced programmer who decided to go back to school and finish my degree - I agree with you, most students haven't bothered to learn how to use a debugger.
BUT...I did a few programming projects with some friends of mine and I showed them how much easier it was to follow what was going on with a debugger. It was like a light turned on for them. And they were thankful for the hours of work it saved them.
I'd have to believe that if nothing else learning how to debug would save lots of hair being pulled out by CS students. Especially those little errors like a variable going out of scope or a line or two of code that is in the wrong place - a debugger will help you catch those types of things immediately, whereas even with the print statements you still might take a while before you catch those types of things.
Doesn't work very well with recursive functions. Especially recursive functions that call other recursive functions. Ever tried to write a recursive descent parser? Next to impossible without a good debugger. You need to be able to step through the code line by line and watch variables as they are loaded on to(and popped off) the stack. No way are print statements going to be nearly as helpful.
Well that STL guru might find himself unemployed and having to get a job programming Java or C#. Problem is, he won't have the right buzzwords on his resume and won't get the job, even if he is a brilliant programmer.
Once the initial price-gouging subsides, I see these things becoming very popular.
Anything to get us fat lazy Americans farther away from having to do anything physical is going to succeed. The Segway does a fantastic job of doing just that. (Hell, when I finished watching The Matrix the first time, my initial impression was, well isn't that what we're all working toward anyway?)
Another Spolsky article points out the dangers of say, someone who knows Visual Basic, but doesn't know how to get around its limitations. Yes, you should know the language and the API's you are working with. But you should also know whats going on under the hood.
Seems to me its more important to know algorithms, data structures, how to implement parsers, how to optimize databases(or knowing when its better to use a custom data structure rather than a database), etc.
But the job ads almost universally ask for knowledge of the specific language. I've worked with C++, Java, VB, Perl, SQL, XML, Javascript, and others, but in my experience knowing what to do with these languages far outweighs knowing the language itself. Why don't recruiters see this?
Its too bad there isn't the level of unionization in the IT industry as there is in other trades and professions. Only in a booming economy do you(individually) have any real bargaining power with big corporations. In today's market, a widespread union would be a big help. The practice of hiring cheap foreign labor and shipping jobs overseas is quite damaging to our social fabric, and I would think would dissuade those who are considering entering the field. A union could make sure corporations are hiring qualified individuals within the community before looking outside for help.
Actually I think you just agreed with what I said, which was that social factors(i.e. upbringing, wealth, social status), rather than the environment had more to do with where a person ended up in life. I meant environment in the biological sense - we all breath the same air, eat food grown in the same soil, etc. The difference in the "environment" of a rich kid and a poor kid is entirely a social construct.
Another good source of chemicals are some of the fertilizers you can get at a local nursery. If you have a good local nursery you can find things like ammonium nitrate, phosphoric acid, sulfur, etc. Professional growers often need to mix specific fertilizer "recipes" with these ingredients, which happen to have lots of other uses besides growing plants.
First of all, the gentleman you replied to did do some research - he quoted a report done by the U.S. News and World Report, while you merely pulled a figure out of your head. FYI, this is what Harvard has to say about the average SAT score of those admitted:
Harvard does not have clearly defined, required minimum scores; however, the majority of student admitted to the College represent a range of scores from roughly 600 to 800 on each section of the SAT I as well as on the SAT II Subject Tests.
So the average is somewhere between 1200 and 1600 for the majority of their students. 2/3 of their students is still a majority.
Second, from what you just said, I think you have either never taken a course in biology or genetics or you are in dire need of a refresher. There is (significantly) less than 1% of a genetic difference between you and anyone else on this planet. And what you would call "environment" is largely constructed from the status quo. There is very little difference, environmentally speaking, between the richest and the poorest Amercians experience.
Your post actually went a long way toward proving that socio-economic factors far outweigh brains and talent when it comes to getting into elite institutions like Harvard.
Seeing as we've sold about two of these per month in the last couple of years, I'd hardly call this a revolution in publishing. Really, it just seems like another gimmick.
With all the hoopla over e-books and print-on-demand books, both of which are better and more innovative ideas than the aqua book, they represent a small fraction of what people actually buy. I happen to prefer computer books in the electronic format, such as the O'Reilly bookshelves, but I'm in the distinct minority. Most people have a definite preference for the dead tree version, and thats something I don't see changing for a long time.
Sorry.
For the simple reason that you need to reboot every time Microsoft comes out with a security patch. I have Windows Update turned on on my desktop machine and every week there is a new security flaw.
Therefore, to keep an internet connected Windows machine "secure", you are talking weekly reboots. Most of us here consider uptime to be the best indicator of stability, and Windows is a far cry from being the most stable system.
Now, its true there have been security holes found in Linux(about 1/4 the frequency of Windows). But at least you don't have to reboot every time you patch something, unless its the kernel. Most patches are on a higher level subsystem that simply needs to be HUP'ed to begin running the patched code. Not so with Windows.
You unfortunately seem to have confused the desirability of running a Windows desktop system with that of running a server. Depending on what kind of server you are talking about(web, email, DNS, firewall, etc.) Microsoft is nowhere near being the most popular, and its because Unix and Linux servers have proven to be more stable and more secure than their Linux counterparts. And they always will be because ease of use is anathema to security and stability.
A competent admin doesn't need a GUI for these servers, in fact a GUI is just a large chunk of code that gets in the way of what these servers need to do.