Slashdot Mirror


User: manicb

manicb's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
211
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 211

  1. Re: Some guy hates competiting with 'free' on Trent Reznor: YouTube Is Built On the Back Of Stolen Content (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    I said he is qualified to talk about these issues, not that he is infallible on them. Obviously the remarks themselves are fair game. The Slashdot readers I intended to criticise are those posting "lol what does this joker know" and assuming he's a standard clueless industry guy because he happens to align with them on this issue.

  2. Re: Some guy hates competiting with 'free' on Trent Reznor: YouTube Is Built On the Back Of Stolen Content (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    He had permission to use the studio. This is quite well-known.

    Re: copying and success, he did the giveaway albums after the multi-platinum record and before the Hollywood soundtracks so... I don't really understand what you're trying to say?

  3. Re: Some guy hates competiting with 'free' on Trent Reznor: YouTube Is Built On the Back Of Stolen Content (theguardian.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    Made a breakthrough album in his free time while working as a studio engineer. Made some more important records. Legendary live performer. Made a couple of film soundtracks. Ran his own label. Had bust-ups with his labels. Told Australian fans to steal his album Year Zero because the prices in the shops were too high. Released an album under Creative Commons NC and made money off the deluxe editions. Released another project under "pay something or don't, up to you". Released an album for free online. Makes remix stems available to all and hosts a site for community remixes. He's probably one of the most qualified people out there to talk about music production and distribution. And Slashdotters are going to ignore that because they don't like what he's saying.

  4. Re: Emacs org mode on Ask Slashdot: Open Tools For Logbooks and Note-taking? · · Score: 1

    Org-mode is the answer. Start with basic outlining features and build from there. If there's something you want to do: a) RTFM, there's a good chance it already exists, otherwise b) contact the mailing list. They're very helpful and feature requests are picked up quickly.

  5. Re:One possible solution... on Paywalled Science Journals Under Fire Again · · Score: 1

    I am a researcher in the UK, and this is pretty much happening here. It's required by the national body which the government uses to fund research (some info here) and that requirement gets passed on to the subject area-specific research councils.

    Basically, work I publish needs to at least be available on a University-level preprint server ("green" open-access); many publications allow this now. For publishers that don't, the research councils have arrangements with research institutes to pay the fees for the final published versions to be publicly available ("gold" open-access). It's not ideal as we're still overpaying the publishers, but it's a compromise that sets a pretty clear direction. In addition, I'm required to make research data readily available. Rumour has it that my research council will soon be picking random papers, trying to get the data, and kicking buttocks where they encounter a problem.

    I don't think legislation is necessary; policy at the funding level seems to be doing the trick, and is a bit more flexible.

  6. Re:The real question is on Will HP's $200 Stream 11 Make People Forget About Chromebooks? · · Score: 1

    Can I run 1080p porn on it?

    32 gigs ain't exactly a lot of porn to torrent, but I can set up a wireless seedbox for that.

    "seedbox"

  7. Re:Even 100,000,000,000,000 is too small on Passwords: Too Much and Not Enough · · Score: 1

    "There must be some kind of way out of here, said the joker to his feet"

    Too many characters, contains an illegal character, doesn't contain a number.

    This. Right here. Every time I come up with a password that is both strong and memorable.

  8. Music analogy is good on MIT Considers Whether Courses Are Outdated · · Score: 1

    The music analogy is more correct than they realise. A huge proportion of music is poorly served by cherry-picking the most appealing tracks; any kind of suite or conceptual work is much better understood when you experience the whole structure. If you can pick a couple of tracks from an album and get a comparable or better experience than someone who listened to the whole thing, it probably wasn't a very good album to start with. Similarly, a course with light depth and populist subjects might be well-suited to cherry-picking, but this would be a symptom of a shallow course.

    The solution of course is to create analogous "Double A-Side" and "EP" courses, which are short, stand alone, and add some breadth to the student experience at a reasonable level of quality. The standard should still be the LP.

  9. Re:Throw the book... maybe literally at him. on NSF Researcher Suspended For Mining Bitcoin · · Score: 1

    Hi, I use research supercomputers. There are rarely many idle cores, as they use queue systems to allow many researchers to simultaneously submit multiple jobs with different requirements. Scheduling software attempts to manage the parallel job sizes to minimise unused nodes. When there are idle cores it is usually for a reason (i.e. running down certain queues at certain times to support certain patterns of use) and it wouldn't be possible to easily squeeze in a little bitcoin crunching.

  10. Re:Throw the book... maybe literally at him. on NSF Researcher Suspended For Mining Bitcoin · · Score: 1

    I don't buy it, but I do use it. The UK academic supercomputer ARCHER has a handy cost calculator:
    http://www.archer.ac.uk/access/au-calculator

    150,000 USD is about 90,000 GBP; playing with the numbers here that would buy a non-partner research council about 1200 hours of 3072-core jobs; about 3.7 million core hours on 2.7 GHz 12-core Ivy Bridge CPUs with 64GB of RAM per 2-CPU node. A non-trivial amount of computer time!

    Given that this is what would be charged to national and European and academic research projects, and is run by a UK research funding council which will have taken some national funds to set up the facility in the first case, I doubt the pricing is wholly unreasonable. It's a shame the article is not clearer on this point, but the most obvious assumption would be that they are talking about $150k at research council rates. In which case the 'fantasy' is in the form of ignored subsidies to capital costs.

  11. Re:It was not misspelled on TSA Missed Boston Bomber Because His Name Was Misspelled In a Database · · Score: 5, Funny

    If only there were some kind of universal character set that included all these scripts

  12. Re:GoG? on Report: Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) Scans Your DNS History · · Score: 1

    PlayOnLinux also makes it pretty easy, and explicitly supports a lot of GOG installers... Currently enjoying Neverwinter Nights from the GOG Insomnia sale on my Linux music production rig. Still, native versions are nice, and I won't buy a game from them if I have reason to suspect a native version is available.

  13. Re:Let work provide tools for work on Ask Slashdot: Configuring Development Environment On a Shared Workstation? · · Score: 1

    Welcome to Slashdot 2014: news for professionals, stuff that you're being paid to care about

  14. Re:Well... on Free Software Foundation Endorses a "Truly Free" Laptop · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When was the last time a proprietary video card driver or wifi chipset called home and caused you any problem?

    I have no idea, and that's the scary part.

  15. Re:No Sympathy on Exponential Algorithm In Windows Update Slowing XP Machines · · Score: 1

    I didn't realise that arguments could be invalidated by mere unpopularity.

  16. Re:Unfortunate Card Naming on AMD Continues To Pressure NVIDIA With Lower Cost Radeon R9 270 and BF4 Bundle · · Score: 1

    I happen to like being able to choose a video card based on specs. I can find what I want at the price I want.

    The difficulty is in understanding what you want. If I sometimes get choppy performance in a game, does that mean I want faster memory or more memory? If I want good rendering performance in Blender using OpenCL, what is the break-even ratio of core clock speed/core number?

  17. Re:Why does Japan's constitution prevent surveilla on Japan Refused To Help NSA Tap Asia's Internet · · Score: 1

    - Japan has schools that primarily educate.

    There are some serious questions regarding the history syllabus in Japanese schools.

  18. Re:Renoise on Ask Slashdot: Best Cross-Platform (Linux-Only) Audio Software? · · Score: 1

    Freaking love Renoise, but trackers aren't for everyone. I use it in combination with a DAW (Logic when I was on Mac, now REAPER running in WINE like a champ on linux) for beat generation and sample mangling.

  19. Re:Ardour on Ask Slashdot: Best Cross-Platform (Linux-Only) Audio Software? · · Score: 1

    Another vote for REAPER here. Runs very well in WINE as they actually test it. KXStudio is a nice distro that provides useful tools for a low-latency setup and will even install REAPER for you.

  20. Re:WYSIWYM vs. WYSIWYG and other axis on Ask Slashdot: Do You Use Markdown and Pandoc? · · Score: 1

    Is MS Word really "all-purpose"? I'd say it was optimised for middle management.

  21. Not great for audio on Milestone: The Millionth UK-Made Raspberry Pi · · Score: 1

    Mine is idling at the moment; I couldn't get an acceptable audio setup. I wanted it to pair up with one of my synths (Novation X-Station) which has an audio interface, so I could use it for playing long samples, backing tracks etc. Wouldn't have minded if it had just turned out to be too slow or unstable, but I think the problem is a mixture of not enough USB power and general poor linux audio. Ah well, back to my netbook for that application, and it was cheap enough that I don't mind having it kicking around for a rainy day project. Home/SSH file server, perhaps?

  22. Re:What's the problem? on All Your Child's Data Are Belong To InBloom · · Score: 1

    Are you seriously using IQ scores as a meaningful reference point while arguing that people may be under-appreciated if you judge them with arbitrary quantitative measures?

    (Not that I doubt your story -- depressingly plausible.)

  23. Re:To be fair on Apple Starts Blocking Unauthorized Lightning Cables With iOS 7 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because the phone manufacturers who use standard usb connectors are having so much trouble...

  24. Re:Code... on A C++ Library That Brings Legacy Fortran Codes To Supercomputers · · Score: 1

    "Secret codes" or "cipher codes" are countable. So are "weather simulation codes".

  25. Re:Musician's prospective on How Amateurs Destroyed the Professional Music Business · · Score: 1

    You've hit on a really interesting point with construction kit songs. It is now common knowledge that anyone can download the tools, read some magazines and *produce* a track. What's a shame is that there is still very little knowledge of how to *write* a track.

    There are plenty of blogs, forums, articles out there, countless books on theory (I'm sure I could find something second-hand for pennies....) So why are there entire subgenres of music that are unable to execute a basic modulation? And why do the handful of pop songs that modulate up towards the end do it so, so badly? Has there ever been a hip-hop track with a tempo change? Why does every emo band think that "vocal harmony" means doubling the line up a third? (Not intended as a slight on the specific genre; at least they acknowledge the presence of more than one musician in the band to do the singing).

    We need to get people listening to better-written music. The industry filter was never a big help.