NeXT computers came with prman, a pretty early version of it: no motion blur for instance. And of course, it was a bit much to expect great results when viewed on a 2-bit gray and white display. It was one of those things thrown into the mix to see if it could fly, like the complete works of Shakespeare, indexed, and NeXTMail, which let you include multimedia in email (predating MIME). Funny that it wasn't bundled with OS X.
The real metric they should have looked at - since it's the main complaint of the managers - was availability. Availability needs are different for different aspects of work. The other half of that is responsiveness: getting the answers and clearances for your work from the stake holders involved.
Neither of those things have anything to do with location. In my previous job, a lot of deployments were done in the wee hours of the night, and the fact that most of us were telecommuters meant that communication wasn't any different form a normal work environment.
Yahoo's real problem is that nobody without a legacy attachment to it needs it at all.
Just because it's a piece of curved glass on your wrist, it might not be a watch. I'm thinking of the ring-like projectors in Zardoz. Siri + projected virtual touch interface means lightweight ubiquitous cloud access.
Apple should skip "TV" monitors anyway and go straight to projection.
Also "Dick Tracy" referrers: Detective Tracy was just the end user, the inventor was Diet Smith. http://dicktracy.wikia.com/wiki/Diet_Smith
It's true that the Google Wave UI is pretty confusing. But I've been wanting to design an email replacement protocol that sits on XMPP for a while now and was happy to see that happen. That it also attempts to solve other problems, like capturing threading in a sensible way, allowing data to be presented in multiple forms and allowing robots to participate in these conversations, really sums up and simplifies a lot of issues in communication in general.
The way to make this is to crowd source it, like with Star Wars Uncut. Apply 2010s social networking technology to 1980s sci-fi. Make sure the aesthetic is true to the 80s if you can - pixels aplenty, 320x240, and of course, extra credit for making your scene on an Amiga. Or at least LOOK like it.
It was an intriguing design - trying to solve the problem of more information in a small, foldable space. Maybe someone will pick this concept up, patents willing. Then again, there's the roll-out computer design.
You breezed right by the "Associates" euphemism as well! A more subtle one was "well above the market based salary range,"
neglecting to say in which country that range was based on or what "well above" really entails.
I've got a working Ampico reproducing baby grand piano and lots of rolls, mostly from the 20s and 30s . New rolls have never been important as patching up the decaying paper on the old ones. Ampico rolls have dynamics info coded in them and they have been considered as accurate digital records of long dead piano virtuosos - although, like all digital recordings, these were heavily edited. I especially recommend any four-hands rolls!
QRS rolls were always more pop oriented - cheesier in their arrangements, but functional.
I'd love to get a roll cutter of course - something always in the back of my mind.
We have an OLPC XO - not the greatest machine, but it does have Pippy, a primitive IDE for python. She already knows basic programming concepts from working with her Lego Mindstorms,
I'd say , do it like I did (late 60s)... learn one language a little and then drop it and learn another one, and keep doing that. You end up learning how the languages are a like and how they differ, what some are good for and what some are not good for. (VB is good for nothing, for instance). Furthermore, the language you are using is less relevant than the conventions (and patterns, bleah) for interfacing with the systems you want to use.
That kind of learning you can never stop needing to do.
Don't be afraid to go nuts with FORTH, LISP, SNOBOL and the other non "ALGOL" like languages. These three have a kind of fruitful simplicity of concept (while occasionally making some really ugly looking code)
To get up and running, Javascript is really great. It's kind of ugly in some ways, like how you make objects in it, but it's pretty ubiquitous.
And for the future of programming, know those languages, but learn erlang.
You are (are you?) probably talking about Microwave Impulse Radar, the miracle technology that was supposed to change our lives years ago. It's tiny bursts of microwave radar, able to be transmitted/received at short ranges at tiny power levels by an on-chip transmitter. Here's a typical article about MIR. Last I read, there were legal battles about shoddy treatment of potential vendors by the LLNL. Slashdot readers would probably do well to track this technology!
UWB's data capacity, speed, low power requirements, and resistance to interference have attracted the attention of major electronic corporations who recognize the technology's commercial potential. Because UWB can penetrate walls, it could become the center of all communications within homes and small offices. UWB signals could carry voice, data, and video. Products could speed downloading images from a digital camera to a computer, connecting printers to computers, and routing high-definition signals to televisions. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) currently restricts commercial UWB applications to between 3.1 and 10.6 gigahertz because of a concern they could interfere with existing transmissions, especially flight radios, beacons, and the Global Positioning System. FCC rules also limit UWB commercial devices to less than 1 watt, which prevents them from working beyond a relatively short distance (about 10 meters).
Using an experimental license, Livermore has developed numerous UWB systems in frequency bands ranging from 200 megahertz to 100 gigahertz. Tests at Livermore have shown that the devices do not cause undue interference with other electronic devices operating in this broad frequency range. Livermore efforts are directed at developing UWB devices for the government that operate both above and below the 3.1- to 10.6-gigahertz band designated for commercial devices.
I'm still using my A3000 with a network card to save stuff on a bigger disk, I turn the thing on once a week or so to use a few programs I've written that I haven't ported (they're in assembler).
Amazing Amiga advantages, circa 1986:
Boots quickly. 4096 colors. A1000 had a color NTSC video out as well. Vast 8M memory space. Shared libraries. Ram disk. Annoying empty floppy disk click. Programmable video hardware. Great SCSI implementation (in later models). DMA graphics and audio processing. Preemptive Multitasking OS allowed for Interprocess communication and other great tricks. Developed IFF data formats, which were very flexible.
After Amiga died, I went on to NeXT, which died also, until it became Mac OSX, and then BeOS, which died and has yet to resurface completely. I'm used to it - I also worked on Vaxen.
I remember a demo of the Atari next to the Amiga. The Atari was playing a little SID-chip type tune (now rather popular). The Amiga then played a hi-fi stereo excerpt of the Grand Canyon Suite. Very impressive, even at 8 bits.
Had they put in a built in MIDI port, it would have been able to get further into the music market; as it turned out, it became a power supply for the Toaster card.
Nobody is making you listen to M$ radio... or any radio for that matter. But if you'd like to leave the radio cookie cutters at home, may I suggest www.wfmu.org, which has been streaming RA and MP3 streams for years and now a Slashdot-friendly Vorbis stream as well. And if you don't like what's on now, you can listen to more than two years of archived programming as well. I hope I didn't just/. the servers...
--- the webhamster at wfmu.org
In the Boorman film ZARDOZ (1974), the futuristic denizens of that film use mini-projectors like these in their rings for interfaces. You can also see Charlotte Rampling and Sean connery in various states of undress.
How would Walt have felt about the character Poomba in the Lion King, whose defining characteristic is that he passes gas? From (somewhat rebellious) Disney Director Jack Kinney's autobio Walt Disney and Assorted Other Characters: An Unauthorized Account of the Early Years at Disney's
Walt's humor is described as "rural" - cow udders flapping, shots of outhouses, etc. John "Ren & Stimpy" Kricfalusi claims his bad taste pales to Disney's , who ended one of the segments from MAKE MINE MUSIC with a close up of a baby's bottom.
Hi folks:
Here are some more examples of computer singing of the past, some of them featured on the great 365 days project. Note: all those samples will be removed in January 2004.
DECTALK voices sing Lee Hazelwood obscurity: http://www.otisfodder.com/365days/arch ive/169.html
The original "Daisy": http://www.otisfodder.com/365days/archiv e/062.html
Daisy again , duetting with Perry Cook's SPASM/Singer (NeXT).
Note: this is a NeXT snd file. http://www.funet.fi/pub/sci/audio/singing-v oice-sy nthesis/example/
also, this fine fake singer: http://www.otisfodder.com/365days/archive /234.html
There are plenty of singing computer links out there if you look!
I haven't experienced firings in this way, but I know you can't send software patch CDs to the USPS via UPS or any other way but their own express mail service - they simply won't accept them!
This is a keyboard used by telephone information operators in NYC. It's made of steel, letters in ALPHABETICAL order (vowels in gray), and there are buttons on the side for each borough!
The physical model you may have seen was probably Perry Cook's Sing program for the NeXT. It's a vocal tract modeller using waveguide synthesis. It's not great, but impressive in that it's completely modelled. Among the interesting innovations in thisprogram are that the nasal cavities are modelled, and not only a glottal impulse is injected into the model, but noise is also passed into the chain of filters at various points. Cook always claimed he'd release an API but never did. still, the principles are pretty easy to understand and it could be done again, I'm sure, and connected to a TTS system like Festival. It is more than ten years later, so there's probaby a lot that could be done. Mr. Cook has spent a lot of the intervening time modeing complicated percussion instruments.
A lot of people have mentioned SAM, the Amiga "say" command and other Klatt-based vocal synthesizers. This algorithm is very useful, made by cascading formant filtrs over a "glottal" impulse (switching with noise as needed), but I don't know if there were Klatt synthesizers for languages other than English... making up the tables might not be too hard. Dennis Klatt died many years ago, but his code lives on.
NYC Downtown composer Phil Klein has been doing performances like that for years - he invites dozens of people to show up with boo boxes, he provides tapes for them and they parade through town or wherever they are going. I've done it - it's fun and disorganized. Read all about it. http://www.mindspring.com/~boombox/index.htm
I really liked gopher... I was the gophermaster at echonyc.com and wfmu.org. Sorry, both servers are down.
Gopher made you explicitly name every thing you served so it was hard to maintain, but on the other hand, very secure. It had a crude cgi-like capability that I used to make some funny tricks like a FIGlet server and various calendar programs. when I set it up, I made little gopher sites for a lot of institutions that I liked , like Film Forum, Experimental Intermedia, Harvestworks, and of course WFMU. I also made up gopher sites for ECHO's forums, the largest being the Whitney museums' site and High Times magazine, which had gopherized versions of their articles! gopher had a full text indexing feature that I used a lot. gopher was a swell protocol. Its demise was mostly due to the lack of form layouts - which was the case of the original www browsers too (I had the NeXT version, but the only place to surf was cern!) Once netscape put in Forms, that was the beginning of the end. The next part of the end was TABLE and FRAME. It was all downhill from there.
XML is a little closer to the idea of serving only information and not crapola, and I hope it catches on for this purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
NeXT computers came with prman, a pretty early version of it: no motion blur for instance. And of course, it was a bit much to expect great results when viewed on a 2-bit gray and white display. It was one of those things thrown into the mix to see if it could fly, like the complete works of Shakespeare, indexed, and NeXTMail, which let you include multimedia in email (predating MIME). Funny that it wasn't bundled with OS X.
The real metric they should have looked at - since it's the main complaint of the managers - was availability. Availability needs are different for different aspects of work. The other half of that is responsiveness: getting the answers and clearances for your work from the stake holders involved.
Neither of those things have anything to do with location.
In my previous job, a lot of deployments were done in the wee hours of the night, and the fact that most of us were telecommuters meant that communication wasn't any different form a normal work environment.
Yahoo's real problem is that nobody without a legacy attachment to it needs it at all.
Just because it's a piece of curved glass on your wrist, it might not be a watch. I'm thinking of the ring-like projectors in Zardoz. Siri + projected virtual touch interface means lightweight ubiquitous cloud access.
Apple should skip "TV" monitors anyway and go straight to projection.
Also "Dick Tracy" referrers: Detective Tracy was just the end user, the inventor was Diet Smith. http://dicktracy.wikia.com/wiki/Diet_Smith
... as if there were no threat from a comet named "eLenin"!
It's true that the Google Wave UI is pretty confusing. But I've been wanting to design an email replacement protocol that sits on XMPP for a while now and was happy to see that happen. That it also attempts to solve other problems, like capturing threading in a sensible way, allowing data to be presented in multiple forms and allowing robots to participate in these conversations, really sums up and simplifies a lot of issues in communication in general.
The way to make this is to crowd source it, like with Star Wars Uncut. Apply 2010s social networking technology to 1980s sci-fi. Make sure the aesthetic is true to the 80s if you can - pixels aplenty, 320x240, and of course, extra credit for making your scene on an Amiga. Or at least LOOK like it.
It was an intriguing design - trying to solve the problem of more information in a small, foldable space. Maybe someone will pick this concept up, patents willing. Then again, there's the roll-out computer design.
You breezed right by the "Associates" euphemism as well!
A more subtle one was "well above the market based salary range,"
neglecting to say in which country that range was based on or what "well above" really entails.
NSA: we snoop to find terrorist threatS (and whatever else we run into)
IBM: We snoop to find profit threats (and whatever else we run into)
I've got a working Ampico reproducing baby grand piano and lots of rolls, mostly from the 20s and 30s . New rolls have never been important as patching up the decaying paper on the old ones.
Ampico rolls have dynamics info coded in them and they have been considered as accurate digital records of long dead piano virtuosos - although, like all digital recordings, these were heavily edited. I especially recommend any four-hands rolls!
QRS rolls were always more pop oriented - cheesier in their arrangements, but functional.
I'd love to get a roll cutter of course - something always in the back of my mind.
We have an OLPC XO - not the greatest machine, but it does have Pippy, a primitive IDE for python. She already knows basic programming concepts from working with her Lego Mindstorms,
I'd say , do it like I did (late 60s) ... learn one language a little and then drop it and learn another one, and keep doing that. You end up learning how the languages are a like and how they differ, what some are good for and what some are not good for. (VB is good for nothing, for instance). Furthermore, the language you are using is less relevant than the conventions (and patterns, bleah) for interfacing with the systems you want to use.
That kind of learning you can never stop needing to do.
Don't be afraid to go nuts with FORTH, LISP, SNOBOL and the other non "ALGOL" like languages. These three have a kind of fruitful simplicity of concept (while occasionally making some really ugly looking code)
To get up and running, Javascript is really great. It's kind of ugly in some ways, like how you make objects in it, but it's pretty ubiquitous.
And for the future of programming, know those languages, but learn erlang.
Here's a typical article about MIR. Last I read, there were legal battles about shoddy treatment of potential vendors by the LLNL. Slashdot readers would probably do well to track this technology!
A taste of this from http://www.eurekalert.org/features/doe/2004-09/dl
The united states should be on the metric system by 1985 a the latest!m etric.htm
http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov/cic_text/misc/usmetric/
I, for one, welcome out new O*****c newspeak overlords!
I'm still using my A3000 with a network card to save stuff on a bigger disk, I turn the thing on once a week or so to use a few programs I've written that I haven't ported (they're in assembler).
Amazing Amiga advantages, circa 1986:
Boots quickly. 4096 colors. A1000 had a color NTSC video out as well. Vast 8M memory space. Shared libraries. Ram disk. Annoying empty floppy disk click. Programmable video hardware. Great SCSI implementation (in later models). DMA graphics and audio processing. Preemptive Multitasking OS
allowed for Interprocess communication and other great tricks. Developed IFF data formats, which were very flexible.
After Amiga died, I went on to NeXT, which died also, until it became Mac OSX, and then BeOS, which died and has yet to resurface completely. I'm used to it - I also worked on Vaxen.
I remember a demo of the Atari next to the Amiga. The Atari was playing a little SID-chip type tune (now rather popular). The
Amiga then played a hi-fi stereo excerpt of the Grand Canyon Suite. Very impressive, even at 8 bits.
Had they put in a built in MIDI port, it would have been able to get further into the music market; as it turned out, it became a power supply for the Toaster card.
Nobody is making you listen to M$ radio... or any radio for that matter. /. the servers...
But if you'd like to leave the radio cookie cutters at home, may I suggest www.wfmu.org, which has been streaming RA and MP3 streams for years and now a Slashdot-friendly Vorbis stream as well. And if you don't like what's on now, you can listen to more than two years of archived programming as well.
I hope I didn't just
--- the webhamster at wfmu.org
In the Boorman film ZARDOZ (1974), the futuristic denizens of that film use mini-projectors like these in their rings for interfaces. You can also see Charlotte Rampling and Sean connery in various states of undress.
How would Walt have felt about the character Poomba in the Lion King, whose defining characteristic is that he passes gas?
From (somewhat rebellious) Disney Director Jack Kinney's autobio
Walt Disney and Assorted Other Characters: An Unauthorized Account of the Early Years at Disney's
Walt's humor is described as "rural" - cow udders flapping,
shots of outhouses, etc. John "Ren & Stimpy" Kricfalusi claims his bad taste pales to Disney's , who ended one of the segments from MAKE MINE MUSIC with a close up of a baby's bottom.
So there is prior art spewing out all over the place.
and how could I leave off:
eddie and eedie? (search for "Some Velvet Morning"
Hi folks:
h ive/169.html
v e/062.html
v oice-sy nthesis/example/
e /234.html
Here are some more examples of computer singing of the past, some of them featured on the great 365 days project. Note: all those samples will be removed in January 2004.
DECTALK voices sing Lee Hazelwood obscurity:
http://www.otisfodder.com/365days/arc
The original "Daisy":
http://www.otisfodder.com/365days/archi
Daisy again , duetting with Perry Cook's SPASM/Singer (NeXT).
Note: this is a NeXT snd file.
http://www.funet.fi/pub/sci/audio/singing-
also, this fine fake singer:
http://www.otisfodder.com/365days/archiv
There are plenty of singing computer links out there if you look!
happy listening!
I haven't experienced firings in this way, but I know you can't send software patch CDs to the USPS via UPS or any other way but their own express mail service - they simply won't accept them!
I'm really asking for a slashdotting, but anyway:
This is a keyboard used by telephone information operators in NYC. It's made of steel, letters in ALPHABETICAL order (vowels in gray), and there are buttons on the side for each borough!
The physical model you may have seen was probably Perry Cook's Sing program for the NeXT. It's a vocal tract modeller using waveguide synthesis. It's not great, but impressive in that it's completely modelled.
Among the interesting innovations in thisprogram are that the nasal cavities are modelled, and not only a glottal impulse is injected into the model, but noise is also passed into the chain of filters at various points.
Cook always claimed he'd release an API but never did. still, the principles are pretty easy to understand and it could be done again, I'm sure, and connected to a TTS system like Festival. It is more than ten years later, so there's probaby a lot that could be done. Mr. Cook has spent a lot of the intervening time modeing complicated percussion instruments.
A lot of people have mentioned SAM, the Amiga "say" command and other Klatt-based vocal synthesizers. This algorithm is very useful, made by cascading formant filtrs over a "glottal" impulse (switching with noise as needed), but I don't know if there were Klatt synthesizers for languages other than English... making up the tables might not be too hard. Dennis Klatt died many years ago, but his code lives on.
NYC Downtown composer Phil Klein has been doing performances like that for years - he invites dozens of people to show up with boo boxes, he provides tapes for them and they parade through town or wherever they are going. I've done it - it's fun and disorganized.
Read all about it.
http://www.mindspring.com/~boombox/index.htm
I really liked gopher... I was the gophermaster at echonyc.com and wfmu.org. Sorry, both servers are down.
Gopher made you explicitly name every thing you served so it was hard to maintain, but on the other hand, very secure. It had a crude cgi-like capability that I used to make some funny tricks like a FIGlet server and various calendar programs.
when I set it up, I made little gopher sites for a lot of institutions that I liked , like Film Forum, Experimental Intermedia, Harvestworks, and of course WFMU. I also made up gopher sites for ECHO's forums, the largest being the Whitney museums' site and High Times magazine, which had gopherized versions of their articles! gopher had a full text indexing feature that I used a lot. gopher was a swell protocol. Its demise was mostly due to the lack of form layouts - which was the case of the original www browsers too (I had the NeXT version, but the only place to surf was cern!) Once netscape put in Forms, that was the beginning of the end. The next part of the end was TABLE and FRAME. It was all downhill from there.
XML is a little closer to the idea of serving only information and not crapola, and I hope it catches on for this purpose.