It's not free, but I wanted to toss out AudioRealism Bassline as another great 303 emulation, which I generally prefer to Rebirth -- it has a larger interface, and more importantly it's a standard VST so it integrates easily with whatever production/DAW software you happen to be using (it sounds great too).
I'm still pretty interested in Rebirth for the 808/909 emulations, though; I haven't seen any other program that does as good a job reproducing the tweakability of those drum boxes.
Also am way excited about the rerelease of Rubber Duck -- to this day, it remains one of the best-sounding software synths I've heard.
My worst incident of spilled drink + computer was a full glass of orange juice knocked over onto the keyboard of an Atari ST -- which had the keyboard and CPU all bundled together in one box, so it's not like I could just plug in a replacement.
Amazingly, it more or less worked after some panicked cleanup. The only long-term damage was a really really sticky "Z" key for months afterwards.
Critical theory and semiotics (the study of signs and symbols) has described the idea of Intertextuality, which is very much in the spirit of what Gibson is discussing here -- there are countless ways in which a text (or song, or other body of work) can connect with other texts. A jazz musician briefly "quotes" a couple of bars of a well-known melody in the midst of a solo as a sort of musical wink. A rapper throws in a line that (to the knowing ear) is an obvious Biggie or Nas reference. William Blake creates vast poetic landscapes with references to the Old Testament sprinkled in. Intertextuality.
"This story is not a song, but a record." -- Lee "Scratch" Perry
Keyhole (Google Earth) already has elevation data, though for something like bike trails, its usefulness might be limited by the resolution of the data.
Keyhole also already tracks GPS coordinates and lets you add your own locations and overlays. I don't know if anybody has written tools to automatically translate between GPS export data and Keyhole's format, but I can't imagine it'd be that difficult.
There's a free trial of Keyhole that's well worth the download; you might want to have a look and I expect most of what you're talking about is already more or less in there.
Somewhat related, I saw earlier today that http://talkingpointsmemo.com/ (a progressive political blog) is going to have a special guest blogger next week in the form of Senator John Edwards (John Kerry's right-hand man last fall); ought to make an interesting read.
imagine if snatch was tried to be americanized, or monty pythons work
I've heard it commented that "Snatch" is in a sense, an americanized "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels". There may be something to that, though I think both are great films.
The term "learning curve" was invented by the aerospace industry in the 1930s as a way to quantify improved efficiency from mass production (basically, the more you do a task, the easier it becomes). The term was later adopted by psychology and the social sciences, where most people first encounter it.
In both cases, the horizontal axis of a learning curve represents time or effort, and the vertical axis represents amount learned or productivity. Therefore something that is intuitively obvious in fact has a steep learning curve.
"Learning curve" was a technical term with a specific definition for decades before it was ever a (misused) marketing buzzword.
I applaud the developers for such a clever idea. (And would feel the same if it were some amazonian trader who treated men as second class citizens, or whatever. )
You may have read the article but you missed the salient point: It wasn't just the US Government that helped write the speech, it was BUSH CAMPAIGN WORKERS. It was a campaign speech disguised as a diplomatic event.
This is an important point that the discussion here has glossed over, that's confirmed by the Washington Post:
The unusual public-relations effort by the Pentagon and the U.S. Agency for International Development comes as details have emerged showing the U.S. government and a representative of President Bush's reelection campaign had been heavily involved in drafting the speech given to Congress last week by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Combined, they indicate that the federal government is working assiduously to improve Americans' opinions about the Iraq conflict -- a key element of Bush's reelection message.
No you don't. You just can't resist the urge to try to smear a Republican leader. (Although since others have pointed out that 1st amendment protection for corporations is a good thing, it's not much of a smear.) You made that up or pulled it out of thin air. If not, tell us what in the world made you think that, other than some vague perception that Reagan was a bad guy and thus only interested in helping bad corporations.
Not trying to smear anybody. What made me think that was a documentary about big media consolidation I was watching recently ("Orwell Rolls in His Grave") which talked about Reagan as a driving force for media deregulation (abolishing the requirements for non-entertainment programming, removal of ownership restrictions that has led to the likes of Clear Channel, etc.) The same documentary also discussed how corporate personhood is one strategy used by big media to unfair ends (as in Penguin's original behavior in the katie.com case, or trying to silence critics by claiming the corporate "person" is being slandered). I mistakenly connected those two threads and was unaware corporate personhood was a much older idea (thanks to Galvatron for the wikipedia link).
Corporations + first amendment protection
on
The Saga of Katie.com
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is a perfect example of the dangers resulting from corporations now being treated as entities which enjoy first amendment protections (I believe it was during Reagan's presidency that this change happened).
Think about this for a second - a huge media corporation with publishing facilities in cities all around the world and teams of lawyers - arguing that their free speech is being violated by one person's individual website. Do you really think it's in the spirit of the first amendment that these two entities should be perfectly equal in the eyes of the law?
I produce electronic music as a semi-professional sideline (see website in profile for lots of samples), and play guitar moderately well (rock/blues, classical, trying to learn some jazz guitar).
I find that making music makes a great way to flex the mental muscles, one which is also aesthetically rewarding and gives a nice break from crunching numbers (though writing electronic music feels suspisciously like writing code a lot of the time).
These categories don't seem entirely removed from reality in my experience. Personally, I'm somewhere in between developer/DBA/Linux monkey, and at my desk I currently have:
Butthole Surfers Celtic Frost Cradle of Filth Iron Maiden The Melvins Sonic Youth a random assortment of house/techno mixes Rachmaninov's piano concerti
in other words, mostly a mix of headbanging, heavy indie, and electronic.
I also wonder how many of the managerial types listen to classical because they actually like it, as opposed to using it as a prop to make themselves look cultured/dignified.
The introduction to the text explains all of this; it's written in TeX (PDF is just used as a common publishing format) with the graphics rendered via gnuplot or as an.eps file; it sounds like they're making it a priority to stick to free, open, commonly available formats and protocols (no Mathematica plots for instance).
No, it's not a great prize, but 20GB of transfer on a fast pipe could be moderately useful, even for just a month (to host an iso image or mid-sized video clip). In any case it's only one of 16 prizes, and probably a better one than a t-shirt or one year's DNS registration (though that too could be fun for goofing off purposes).
That hypothetical conversation will never happen. . . because, if a prosecutor can cite a "national security need," thanks to the USAPATRIOT act, he can get the warrant without ever having to go before a judge.
No, the prosecutor would have to answer to a judge, only thing is it would be a judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -- the FISC is a seven-member panel, comprised of judges hand-picked by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and it meets in secret and answers only to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (which also meets in secret).
In all of the FISC's existence, only a single case has gone up for review, a case which challenged some of the more severe powers granted by the USA PATRIOT Act -- the FISCR's ruling upheld that yes, the FISC did have the right to use the powers it sought.
At my workplace 3-4 years ago were several HP-9000 minicomputers running the HP-UX flavor of Unix and the "Networker" backup software from Legato. Networker has an extremely convoluted, ultra-paranoid system of license key authentication that somehow always involved multiple phone calls to the vendor every time we wanted to install the software on a new server.
The crowning moment came after a severe hardware failure on one of the machines necessitated a replacement motherboard. The replacement went smoothly until such time as we tried starting the backup software, only to be given a big nasty license error -- Networker had detected the change in hardware and no way was it going to run on *this* strange machine.
A call to the vendor revealed that while we were properly licensed to use Networker, the support contract (several thousand dollars a year) for the account had expired. Yes, we were perfectly entitled to run that software, but we weren't entitled to talk to tech support. And only tech support is allowed to hand out new license keys.
I'm not sure if the person on the other end of phone was incompetant, or trying to hold us hostage to buy another support contract, or some other bit of weird politics (and I'm willing to concede the possibility that the problem may have just been a couple of individuals who didn't know what they were doing), but it took close to two days of phone calls before they finally put us through to the gatekeepers in tech support. And keep in mind this is for an BACKUP AND RECOVERY SYSTEM for a large, high-profile application; if the disk array had gone along with the motherboard, we would have been unable to restore from tape.
Eventually on day two they do patch us through to a techie, who is also weirdly evasive about wanting to give up a new license key. The woman at our end who is talking to him patiently explains that the mobo has been replaced, everything is working fine except Networker won't recognize the new hardware.
"Well maybe they installed the motherboard wrong," was tech support's response. I felt only a little sorry for the guy, who I'm sure could clearly hear the roomful of derisive laughter when this comment was repeated to the rest of our group.
A couple of hours later we had a new license key and all was well again.
I don't exactly see a Groupwise client for Linux (or a free one on the Windows side).
It's been a few years since I've seriously administered Groupwise (and Novell has changed hands a couple of times since then) but I'm pretty sure the licensing structure was based on number of connections, not number of installed copies. So in a sense, the client software has always been free; it's just very useful unless you have a properly licensed Groupwise server to connect with.
I see lots of similarities between Windows and other early GUIs (MacOS and GEM), but you are correct that there is a difference between borrowing general look-and-feel and writing a functional equivilant to a specific piece of software.
The thing is, the typical end user of a tool like a spreadsheet or word processor is less interested in innovation and more interested in something that conforms to their experience of other similar tools -- people don't want to have to learn a whole new set of keybindings and work habits when moving from program to program.
Word and Excel are ubiquitous to the point where they have set a standard of what people think of (in terms of interface and features) when they think of a spreadsheet or word processor; for a developer to ignore that would be sort of like a piano maker building a piano with round keys and expecting people to instantly favor it "because it's still a piano".
When you buy a license to use Excel, the right to use the software legally is only one of the things you're paying for. You're also paying for tech support, you're paying for accountability (somebody to point the finger at when your data myteriously vanishes), and to a certain extent you're making an investment in the future development of the software. That's all important for large businesses and other organizations, but I don't think it's unreasonable for an individual or small business to want a compatible tool without paying for the rest of the baggage implied by the license cost.
I think it's a legitimate viewpoint to be critical of software which copies the functions and interface of other programs, but I don't think it's a viewpoint that's healthy for the marketplace or one that best encourages the growth and evolution of the state of software as a whole.
I don't see any real difference between work-alike software like Planmaker and, say, someone writing a new C compiler to an existing standard, or AMD making chips that run code written on Intel machines. And in both of those cases, I strongly think that the existence of copycats is good for users, good for the marketplace (by discouraging monopoly), and good for the state of technology.
Just like Microsoft didn't have to pay any designers or usability experts for all of the UI ideas they borrowed from Digital Research (GEM), Apple, Xerox/PARC, the X Consortium, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not free, but I wanted to toss out AudioRealism Bassline as another great 303 emulation, which I generally prefer to Rebirth -- it has a larger interface, and more importantly it's a standard VST so it integrates easily with whatever production/DAW software you happen to be using (it sounds great too).
I'm still pretty interested in Rebirth for the 808/909 emulations, though; I haven't seen any other program that does as good a job reproducing the tweakability of those drum boxes.
Also am way excited about the rerelease of Rubber Duck -- to this day, it remains one of the best-sounding software synths I've heard.
My worst incident of spilled drink + computer was a full glass of orange juice knocked over onto the keyboard of an Atari ST -- which had the keyboard and CPU all bundled together in one box, so it's not like I could just plug in a replacement.
Amazingly, it more or less worked after some panicked cleanup. The only long-term damage was a really really sticky "Z" key for months afterwards.
"This story is not a song, but a record." -- Lee "Scratch" Perry
Keyhole (Google Earth) already has elevation data, though for something like bike trails, its usefulness might be limited by the resolution of the data.
Keyhole also already tracks GPS coordinates and lets you add your own locations and overlays. I don't know if anybody has written tools to automatically translate between GPS export data and Keyhole's format, but I can't imagine it'd be that difficult.
There's a free trial of Keyhole that's well worth the download; you might want to have a look and I expect most of what you're talking about is already more or less in there.
Somewhat related, I saw earlier today that http://talkingpointsmemo.com/ (a progressive political blog) is going to have a special guest blogger next week in the form of Senator John Edwards (John Kerry's right-hand man last fall); ought to make an interesting read.
imagine if snatch was tried to be americanized, or monty pythons work
I've heard it commented that "Snatch" is in a sense, an americanized "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels". There may be something to that, though I think both are great films.
Wrong - the American psychologist E.L. Thorndike was using learning curves in 1911 or before
I did not know that, thanks!
Aren't you confusing "learning curve" with "economy of scales" here?
Nope.
A flat learning curve is a bad thing.
The term "learning curve" was invented by the aerospace industry in the 1930s as a way to quantify improved efficiency from mass production (basically, the more you do a task, the easier it becomes). The term was later adopted by psychology and the social sciences, where most people first encounter it.
In both cases, the horizontal axis of a learning curve represents time or effort, and the vertical axis represents amount learned or productivity. Therefore something that is intuitively obvious in fact has a steep learning curve.
"Learning curve" was a technical term with a specific definition for decades before it was ever a (misused) marketing buzzword.
Thank you for your time :)
I applaud the developers for such a clever idea. (And would feel the same if it were some amazonian trader who treated men as second class citizens, or whatever. )
I like thought-provoking entertainment.
This is an important point that the discussion here has glossed over, that's confirmed by the Washington Post:
No you don't. You just can't resist the urge to try to smear a Republican leader. (Although since others have pointed out that 1st amendment protection for corporations is a good thing, it's not much of a smear.) You made that up or pulled it out of thin air. If not, tell us what in the world made you think that, other than some vague perception that Reagan was a bad guy and thus only interested in helping bad corporations.
Not trying to smear anybody. What made me think that was a documentary about big media consolidation I was watching recently ("Orwell Rolls in His Grave") which talked about Reagan as a driving force for media deregulation (abolishing the requirements for non-entertainment programming, removal of ownership restrictions that has led to the likes of Clear Channel, etc.) The same documentary also discussed how corporate personhood is one strategy used by big media to unfair ends (as in Penguin's original behavior in the katie.com case, or trying to silence critics by claiming the corporate "person" is being slandered). I mistakenly connected those two threads and was unaware corporate personhood was a much older idea (thanks to Galvatron for the wikipedia link).
This is a perfect example of the dangers resulting from corporations now being treated as entities which enjoy first amendment protections (I believe it was during Reagan's presidency that this change happened).
Think about this for a second - a huge media corporation with publishing facilities in cities all around the world and teams of lawyers - arguing that their free speech is being violated by one person's individual website. Do you really think it's in the spirit of the first amendment that these two entities should be perfectly equal in the eyes of the law?
I produce electronic music as a semi-professional sideline (see website in profile for lots of samples), and play guitar moderately well (rock/blues, classical, trying to learn some jazz guitar).
I find that making music makes a great way to flex the mental muscles, one which is also aesthetically rewarding and gives a nice break from crunching numbers (though writing electronic music feels suspisciously like writing code a lot of the time).
These categories don't seem entirely removed from reality in my experience. Personally, I'm somewhere in between developer/DBA/Linux monkey, and at my desk I currently have:
Butthole Surfers
Celtic Frost
Cradle of Filth
Iron Maiden
The Melvins
Sonic Youth
a random assortment of house/techno mixes
Rachmaninov's piano concerti
in other words, mostly a mix of headbanging, heavy indie, and electronic.
I also wonder how many of the managerial types listen to classical because they actually like it, as opposed to using it as a prop to make themselves look cultured/dignified.
The introduction to the text explains all of this; it's written in TeX (PDF is just used as a common publishing format) with the graphics rendered via gnuplot or as an .eps file; it sounds like they're making it a priority to stick to free, open, commonly available formats and protocols (no Mathematica plots for instance).
How exactly is this a prize?
No, it's not a great prize, but 20GB of transfer on a fast pipe could be moderately useful, even for just a month (to host an iso image or mid-sized video clip). In any case it's only one of 16 prizes, and probably a better one than a t-shirt or one year's DNS registration (though that too could be fun for goofing off purposes).
Well, he was growing rape seed.
That hypothetical conversation will never happen. . . because, if a prosecutor can cite a "national security need," thanks to the USAPATRIOT act, he can get the warrant without ever having to go before a judge.
No, the prosecutor would have to answer to a judge, only thing is it would be a judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -- the FISC is a seven-member panel, comprised of judges hand-picked by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and it meets in secret and answers only to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (which also meets in secret).
In all of the FISC's existence, only a single case has gone up for review, a case which challenged some of the more severe powers granted by the USA PATRIOT Act -- the FISCR's ruling upheld that yes, the FISC did have the right to use the powers it sought.
At my workplace 3-4 years ago were several HP-9000 minicomputers running the HP-UX flavor of Unix and the "Networker" backup software from Legato. Networker has an extremely convoluted, ultra-paranoid system of license key authentication that somehow always involved multiple phone calls to the vendor every time we wanted to install the software on a new server.
The crowning moment came after a severe hardware failure on one of the machines necessitated a replacement motherboard. The replacement went smoothly until such time as we tried starting the backup software, only to be given a big nasty license error -- Networker had detected the change in hardware and no way was it going to run on *this* strange machine.
A call to the vendor revealed that while we were properly licensed to use Networker, the support contract (several thousand dollars a year) for the account had expired. Yes, we were perfectly entitled to run that software, but we weren't entitled to talk to tech support. And only tech support is allowed to hand out new license keys.
I'm not sure if the person on the other end of phone was incompetant, or trying to hold us hostage to buy another support contract, or some other bit of weird politics (and I'm willing to concede the possibility that the problem may have just been a couple of individuals who didn't know what they were doing), but it took close to two days of phone calls before they finally put us through to the gatekeepers in tech support. And keep in mind this is for an BACKUP AND RECOVERY SYSTEM for a large, high-profile application; if the disk array had gone along with the motherboard, we would have been unable to restore from tape.
Eventually on day two they do patch us through to a techie, who is also weirdly evasive about wanting to give up a new license key. The woman at our end who is talking to him patiently explains that the mobo has been replaced, everything is working fine except Networker won't recognize the new hardware.
"Well maybe they installed the motherboard wrong," was tech support's response. I felt only a little sorry for the guy, who I'm sure could clearly hear the roomful of derisive laughter when this comment was repeated to the rest of our group.
A couple of hours later we had a new license key and all was well again.
If you can't put your name on it, you wasted your time typing it because we ignore you.
Yes and how is Mrs. BCW2 these days?
- Steve Harvey
Actually, there is such a thing as bad press. this didn't help [entertainment company], this didn't help [soft drink manufacturer].
Yes, it did help them -- it got you to give those companies free advertising up there.
I don't exactly see a Groupwise client for Linux (or a free one on the Windows side).
It's been a few years since I've seriously administered Groupwise (and Novell has changed hands a couple of times since then) but I'm pretty sure the licensing structure was based on number of connections, not number of installed copies. So in a sense, the client software has always been free; it's just very useful unless you have a properly licensed Groupwise server to connect with.
I see lots of similarities between Windows and other early GUIs (MacOS and GEM), but you are correct that there is a difference between borrowing general look-and-feel and writing a functional equivilant to a specific piece of software.
The thing is, the typical end user of a tool like a spreadsheet or word processor is less interested in innovation and more interested in something that conforms to their experience of other similar tools -- people don't want to have to learn a whole new set of keybindings and work habits when moving from program to program.
Word and Excel are ubiquitous to the point where they have set a standard of what people think of (in terms of interface and features) when they think of a spreadsheet or word processor; for a developer to ignore that would be sort of like a piano maker building a piano with round keys and expecting people to instantly favor it "because it's still a piano".
When you buy a license to use Excel, the right to use the software legally is only one of the things you're paying for. You're also paying for tech support, you're paying for accountability (somebody to point the finger at when your data myteriously vanishes), and to a certain extent you're making an investment in the future development of the software. That's all important for large businesses and other organizations, but I don't think it's unreasonable for an individual or small business to want a compatible tool without paying for the rest of the baggage implied by the license cost.
I think it's a legitimate viewpoint to be critical of software which copies the functions and interface of other programs, but I don't think it's a viewpoint that's healthy for the marketplace or one that best encourages the growth and evolution of the state of software as a whole.
I don't see any real difference between work-alike software like Planmaker and, say, someone writing a new C compiler to an existing standard, or AMD making chips that run code written on Intel machines. And in both of those cases, I strongly think that the existence of copycats is good for users, good for the marketplace (by discouraging monopoly), and good for the state of technology.
Just like Microsoft didn't have to pay any designers or usability experts for all of the UI ideas they borrowed from Digital Research (GEM), Apple, Xerox/PARC, the X Consortium, etc.