I'd bet that the total number of people employed by all those organziations put together *might* come close to the number of people working at Microsoft. Furthermore, who do you think earns more money, a low-level programmer at MS, or the guy filing tapes in some basement at MTV?
You can't just point at an NFL linebacker and say, "Look, black people have plenty of opportunities."
Re:Linux has been running on Alpha for quite a whi
on
Is SMT In Your Future?
·
· Score: 1
I imagine there would be a similar problem to what Intel is facing right now with the P4. I don't claim to be a compiler technology guru, but I imagine the EV8 will only be very fast when code was compiled specifically for it (then again, which other processors isn't this true for?
This is just another example of government screwing over the capitalists that it claims to
love. A city and/or state invites these companies in, happy about the jobs it will provide, and the money it will bring to the
region. Then, they fail to provide power infrastructure.
You might actually want to find out what you're talking about before you go off on an anti-government rant. California has a deregulated power industry. That's right, government has nothing to do with providing power to the citizens and business of California (disclaimer: I should know; I live in Silicon Valley). The reason why there's a power shortage right now is that about 1/4 of the area plants are down for both scheduled and unscheduled maintainance. The reason for these power shortages in general is that the private power companies (aka PG&E) have no incentive to build additional plants, since that would drive down the cost of electricity for its customers.
1000 users is NOTHING to Exchange. You can easily do that on one server in a single site, and it'll run itself.
I'm sorry, but in my experience that simply isn't true. I've worked on a 500 user site running Exchange 5.0 on a quad-processor PPro with 512MB RAM, and it was completely bogged down. Normal end-user work wasn't particualarly slow, but trying to do *anything* on the server was painful. Any window activity regularly took several minutes between screen refreshes, and rebooting the server guarenteed an hour of downtime (30 min waiting for Exchange to shut down, 30 min waiting for it to start back up).
Also, don't forget that you'll have to back up the server. This means that you'll have to purchase a $X,000 client license, plus a spare server to restore in the event of a failure. At least with Legato Network backing up Exchange 5.0, the *only* way to do a restore was to restore the entire database at once.
In an SDMI world, your soundcard would refuse to play the new.wav because it still has the magic mark of Cain.
Do you realize how *unlikely* this is to happen? Your average game probably has between several hundered and several thousand sound effects, and maybe a few dozen cinematics. Suddenly, every single one of them has to be encoded with the watermark from a completely different industry, just because they happen to both use the same hardware. Amateur musicans would be another group who might not quietly accept getting screwed if SDMI hardware becomes the law.
The fact is, there isn't even really an need to defeat the watermarking. Free unhindered (aka SDMI-free) players will always exist, and it's trivial to re-encode *any* audio file as an unhindered format (mp3, Ogg). Once SDMI happens, people will port and write GUIs for mpg123, LAME, etc. for Windows, and life will continue as usual.
There's no need to crack SDMI when we can simply ignore it.
What's to prevent me from taking an SDMI-protected song, dumping it to a.wav file [1], and then re-encoding it with, say, ogg? As a worst case scenario, I could set up a loopback with the D/A A/D converters on my soundcard to get the.wav. Will the watermark still exist in the.ogg file? Does that matter?
Every time you see an $8 TW movie, send $16 to the EFF. That's $24 a movie, so it will make you evaluate what you see more
critically.
Better yet, wait a month or so after it comes out, and go see it at a smaller second-run theater. You'll only pay $3-5, and you'll have the peace of mind that most/all the money is going to the theater instead of the movie studio.
"Every single artist that you do like is supported by another you might not like," -Lowery
In my mind, this is one of the fundamental problems with the music industry. I mean, an artist who "only" sells 100,000 CDs can't break even, and depends on the profits of someone who sells 5,000,000 CDs. That's just a broken business model. The recording industry has gotten so used to mega-profitably multi-platinum national "acts," that they've pretty much given up on making money on music that might not play in every mall on Earth.
Please, go ahead and address it to ! It's an excellent and well thought out piece that really explains a lot of the confusion going on regarding Free vs. Open Source software. From what I've heard, RMS always reads his mail, and isn't that bad a guy to enter a dialog with as long as you're smart enough to keep up your end. Go for it!
Bach and Beethoven were definitely paid for their compositions. (I imagine Brahms was too, but I don't know for sure.) The people who paid them had the power to dictate what was to be composed, and when it should be ready. Bach lived in a time when the notion of appeasing royalty was still quite contemporary, and this was the purpose of his Musical Offering, which he hoped would result in a job. (IIRC, it didn't.)
Oh, as opposed to big-selling bands like N'Sync and Brittney, who have totally artistic freedom to compose whatever they like (end sarcasm).
Seriously, the musicians who get paid the most have the least control over what music they play. The really creative ones generally have day jobs.
Or what if intelligent alien life is actually... alien? Let's face it; the aliens in Star Trek are all exactly like humans, except for a single key difference. The Klingons are exactly like humans, except more aggressive. The Ferengi are exactly like humans, except more materialistic. Etc. This makes for an interesting show, but realism it ain't.
Now for a plausible look at what intelligent alien life might be like, read _Solaris_ by Stanislaw Lem. The difference between us and an intelligent alien is likely to be far greater than the difference between any two terran species.
Riiight... everybody pretty much sounds the same while singing. Maybe that's why I keep mixing up Lemmy from Moetorhead and Christina Agulera. Not to mention the Japanese choir from _Ghost_in_the_Shell.
Along the lines of software that actually does something that a lot of high-school students might be interested in, how about a simple synthesizer? You could start with a basic sine wave oscillator, and add on controls to change the pitch, amplitude, waveform, and so forth. If you were feeling really adventurous, you could even get into envelope and bandpass filters.
Just strikes me as a project that could be within the scope of a HS course, but would hold the interest of students. Anyone know of a good programming reference for this sort of thing?
I've been following the Mozilla milestones and I seriously doubt that a stable Mozilla will be produced by the end of the year.
That's funny; I'm using a stable Mozilla right now. It crashes far less on me that 4.7x ever has, it renders pages far faster, and it has the same or smaller memory footprint. About the only thing that Mozilla M16 (latest nightly) doesn't do is plug-ins, and honestly, I don't really give a #%$*& about flash.
Question for those in the know: Are the new TLDs that ICANN is working on going to be enforced at all? For example, if there's a.sux domain, and people/corporations start registering subdomains for purposes other than sites about stuff that sucks, will ICANN or anyone else have the means not to grant them that domain?
In other words, are the new TLDs going to be.com/.org/.net or are they going to be.edu/.gov?
Review of the sequencer software:
on
Pilot Synthesis
·
· Score: 3
I've downloaded and tried out the drum machine software that comes with it, so here are some pros and cons This is for the program BeatPad, there are a couple others, including a musical notation program, that I haven't tried yet.
Pros:
Excellent Interface: Both the melody and drum sequencers are intuitive to use, and well scaled to the pilot screen.
Lots of patterns: you can have thirty-two each of melody and drum in four banks of eight. This will also send out a program change MIDI signal
Flexable MIDI interface: You can set the MIDI channel for both the melody and drum instruments, as well as sending out program changes and a standard MIDI clock (good for controlling an external sequencer).
Cons:
Only one measure: You get four beats to play with per program. If you want a longer sequence, you have to spread it over multiple patterns.
No song mode: you can't have it play pattern A1 four times, then automatically switch to pattern B3 for two repeats, etc.
Only one melody voice: This is a monophonic (no chords) single voiced melody sequencer. I'd like the ability at least to play a few notes simultaneously (which the drum sequencer can do), and preferably have more than one voice at once as well.
Fair enough; I'm busted. I do know how to read and write musical notation, but since what I'm doing these days is mostly rhythm-based, it's not always a good option. Drum notation is a royal pain.
> As far as noise/music/muzak goes, MIDI isn't the > greatest thing in the world.
Dude, probably 95% of the popular music recorded in the world makes use of MIDI. You're confusing crappy web-site software-based proggies with a world-standard Musical Instrument Digital Interface. AKA what you use to get your synths to talk with eachother, and sync to the recording console.
Please know what you're talking about before you post.
I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of this device. It's not for playing back MIDI (although it could be used for that), it's for *composing* music, based on the MIDI protocol. This is not for turning your Pilot into a walkman, it's for turning it into a musical sketchpad.
I've always like this sort of hypothetical what-if, like what if Bach had a Kurzweil K2500 (top-of-the-line sampling keyboard). If you think about it, a lot of the sounds used in modern music are completely unimaginable to someone whose only exposure is to acoustic instruments, so that ability to imagine a sound and then create it is really interesting.
Re:Can someone please explain: Why?
on
Pilot Synthesis
·
· Score: 1
It's not for you-- it's for people who write music. I can't think of how many times I've wanted to be able to jot down a nice melody or a good beat for future reference and then be able to transfer it later to my main synths.
The same company is also making a standard MIDI I/O cable for the pilot, and it looks like the software should be at least mostly GM compliant.
One major limitation of the software that comes with both the cable and the synth is that it only supports a single monophonic instrument-- that is, one note at a time, no chords, no multiple instruments simultaneously. I hope that this is a software limitation, and not a limitation of the synth. For $200 I better get polyphony!
Slashdot Mirror
I'd bet that the total number of people employed by all those organziations put together *might* come close to the number of people working at Microsoft. Furthermore, who do you think earns more money, a low-level programmer at MS, or the guy filing tapes in some basement at MTV?
You can't just point at an NFL linebacker and say, "Look, black people have plenty of opportunities."
The Transmeta Crusoe?
You might actually want to find out what you're talking about before you go off on an anti-government rant. California has a deregulated power industry. That's right, government has nothing to do with providing power to the citizens and business of California (disclaimer: I should know; I live in Silicon Valley). The reason why there's a power shortage right now is that about 1/4 of the area plants are down for both scheduled and unscheduled maintainance. The reason for these power shortages in general is that the private power companies (aka PG&E) have no incentive to build additional plants, since that would drive down the cost of electricity for its customers.
He's also got the Adventures of Tom Sawyer for NES, which Something Awful has a hilarious review of in their ROM pit.
1000 users is NOTHING to Exchange. You can easily do that on one server in a single site, and it'll run itself.
I'm sorry, but in my experience that simply isn't true. I've worked on a 500 user site running Exchange 5.0 on a quad-processor PPro with 512MB RAM, and it was completely bogged down. Normal end-user work wasn't particualarly slow, but trying to do *anything* on the server was painful. Any window activity regularly took several minutes between screen refreshes, and rebooting the server guarenteed an hour of downtime (30 min waiting for Exchange to shut down, 30 min waiting for it to start back up).
Also, don't forget that you'll have to back up the server. This means that you'll have to purchase a $X,000 client license, plus a spare server to restore in the event of a failure. At least with Legato Network backing up Exchange 5.0, the *only* way to do a restore was to restore the entire database at once.
Hey, that's an interesting idea. Anyone make a manual (aka mechanical) computer keyboard? Something that takes a few pounds/sq. inch to type on?
In an SDMI world, your soundcard would refuse to play the new .wav because it still has the magic mark of Cain.
Do you realize how *unlikely* this is to happen? Your average game probably has between several hundered and several thousand sound effects, and maybe a few dozen cinematics. Suddenly, every single one of them has to be encoded with the watermark from a completely different industry, just because they happen to both use the same hardware. Amateur musicans would be another group who might not quietly accept getting screwed if SDMI hardware becomes the law.
The fact is, there isn't even really an need to defeat the watermarking. Free unhindered (aka SDMI-free) players will always exist, and it's trivial to re-encode *any* audio file as an unhindered format (mp3, Ogg). Once SDMI happens, people will port and write GUIs for mpg123, LAME, etc. for Windows, and life will continue as usual.
There's no need to crack SDMI when we can simply ignore it.
What's to prevent me from taking an SDMI-protected song, dumping it to a .wav file [1], and then re-encoding it with, say, ogg? As a worst case scenario, I could set up a loopback with the D/A A/D converters on my soundcard to get the .wav. Will the watermark still exist in the .ogg file? Does that matter?
Every time you see an $8 TW movie, send $16 to the EFF. That's $24 a movie, so it will make you evaluate what you see more critically.
Better yet, wait a month or so after it comes out, and go see it at a smaller second-run theater. You'll only pay $3-5, and you'll have the peace of mind that most/all the money is going to the theater instead of the movie studio.
"Every single artist that you do like is supported by another you might not like," -Lowery
In my mind, this is one of the fundamental problems with the music industry. I mean, an artist who "only" sells 100,000 CDs can't break even, and depends on the profits of someone who sells 5,000,000 CDs. That's just a broken business model. The recording industry has gotten so used to mega-profitably multi-platinum national "acts," that they've pretty much given up on making money on music that might not play in every mall on Earth.
Please, go ahead and address it to ! It's an excellent and well thought out piece that really explains a lot of the confusion going on regarding Free vs. Open Source software. From what I've heard, RMS always reads his mail, and isn't that bad a guy to enter a dialog with as long as you're smart enough to keep up your end. Go for it!
--Alex
Bach and Beethoven were definitely paid for their compositions. (I imagine Brahms was too, but I don't know for sure.) The people who paid them had the power to dictate what was to be composed, and when it should be ready. Bach lived in a time when the notion of appeasing royalty was still quite contemporary, and this was the purpose of his Musical Offering, which he hoped would result in a job. (IIRC, it didn't.)
Oh, as opposed to big-selling bands like N'Sync and Brittney, who have totally artistic freedom to compose whatever they like (end sarcasm).
Seriously, the musicians who get paid the most have the least control over what music they play. The really creative ones generally have day jobs.
Or what if intelligent alien life is actually... alien? Let's face it; the aliens in Star Trek are all exactly like humans, except for a single key difference. The Klingons are exactly like humans, except more aggressive. The Ferengi are exactly like humans, except more materialistic. Etc. This makes for an interesting show, but realism it ain't.
Now for a plausible look at what intelligent alien life might be like, read _Solaris_ by Stanislaw Lem. The difference between us and an intelligent alien is likely to be far greater than the difference between any two terran species.
Riiight... everybody pretty much sounds the same while singing. Maybe that's why I keep mixing up Lemmy from Moetorhead and Christina Agulera. Not to mention the Japanese choir from _Ghost_in_the_Shell.
Along the lines of software that actually does something that a lot of high-school students might be interested in, how about a simple synthesizer? You could start with a basic sine wave oscillator, and add on controls to change the pitch, amplitude, waveform, and so forth. If you were feeling really adventurous, you could even get into envelope and bandpass filters.
Just strikes me as a project that could be within the scope of a HS course, but would hold the interest of students. Anyone know of a good programming reference for this sort of thing?
I've been following the Mozilla milestones and I seriously doubt that a stable Mozilla will be produced by the end of the year.
That's funny; I'm using a stable Mozilla right now. It crashes far less on me that 4.7x ever has, it renders pages far faster, and it has the same or smaller memory footprint. About the only thing that Mozilla M16 (latest nightly) doesn't do is plug-ins, and honestly, I don't really give a #%$*& about flash.
So don't dis it until you've tried it.
Question for those in the know: Are the new TLDs that ICANN is working on going to be enforced at all? For example, if there's a .sux domain, and people/corporations start registering subdomains for purposes other than sites about stuff that sucks, will ICANN or anyone else have the means not to grant them that domain?
.com/.org/.net or are they going to be .edu/.gov?
In other words, are the new TLDs going to be
I've downloaded and tried out the drum machine software that comes with it, so here are some pros and cons This is for the program BeatPad, there are a couple others, including a musical notation program, that I haven't tried yet.
Pros:
Cons:
Fair enough; I'm busted. I do know how to read and write musical notation, but since what I'm doing these days is mostly rhythm-based, it's not always a good option. Drum notation is a royal pain.
Also, instant feedback is still a good thing.
> As far as noise/music/muzak goes, MIDI isn't the
> greatest thing in the world.
Dude, probably 95% of the popular music recorded in the world makes use of MIDI. You're confusing crappy web-site software-based proggies with a world-standard Musical Instrument Digital Interface. AKA what you use to get your synths to talk with eachother, and sync to the recording console.
Please know what you're talking about before you post.
I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of this device. It's not for playing back MIDI (although it could be used for that), it's for *composing* music, based on the MIDI protocol. This is not for turning your Pilot into a walkman, it's for turning it into a musical sketchpad.
I've always like this sort of hypothetical what-if, like what if Bach had a Kurzweil K2500 (top-of-the-line sampling keyboard). If you think about it, a lot of the sounds used in modern music are completely unimaginable to someone whose only exposure is to acoustic instruments, so that ability to imagine a sound and then create it is really interesting.
It's not for you-- it's for people who write music. I can't think of how many times I've wanted to be able to jot down a nice melody or a good beat for future reference and then be able to transfer it later to my main synths.
The same company is also making a standard MIDI I/O cable for the pilot, and it looks like the software should be at least mostly GM compliant.
One major limitation of the software that comes with both the cable and the synth is that it only supports a single monophonic instrument-- that is, one note at a time, no chords, no multiple instruments simultaneously. I hope that this is a software limitation, and not a limitation of the synth. For $200 I better get polyphony!