and also, vivendi universal is a member of the MPAA, which is attempting to punish people for using DeCSS... and which also believes that the cd/dvd region system is a completely ethical way of doing business...
ok, since I have never built a cluster or even networked two computers together, I think I'd be a pretty good judge of what looks easy or not.
I looked at the SCL Cluster Cookbook link provided. keeping in mind that I know nothing about networking anyways, I scanned the list of links on that page; most of them looked like glossaries, introductions, intensive hardware discussions, etc., but there was one that jumped right out of the page:
How to Build a Four-Node Cluster
so I clicked it. the resulting page looked like it really could be printed on a single sheet of paper. skimming through it, it looks pretty easy to understand, although I may have to look up stuff on each step to make sure I'm doing it right. (in particular, I would want to look up how to configure one of the servers as an NFS server and read the instructions for installing MPICH.)
so I would say that, although ease-of-use could always be improved, one-page directions on how to set up a linux cluster definitely do exist and do not look that hard.
ah, here is the problem: you have to begin the line with "begin" followed by TWO spaces. not something that happens too frequently by accident.
microsoft has changed their support.microsoft.com interface again in an attempt to prevent people from fixing their own problems, but if you look up the following Q number, you can find the information: Q265230.
nor could I... I currently use Outlook Express 5, because I haven't taken the time to set up GNU Emacs for reading my mail. according to his message, early versions of OE have this bug, while newer versions keep the bug but remove "view source" as a workaround.
I sent myself a message that began with normal text, then added a line that said "BEGIN test". I received it fine -- it doesn't even put the text into an attachment.
I think he's confused. I do remember hearing about the bug, but only in relation to Outlook (not OE.) his reference to the fact that the bug disappears when the destination is on an exchange server seems to verify this; OE does POP3, IMAP and HTTP mail servers but not exchange.
The idea of UWB making GPS "obsolete" is pretty laughable.
I think that was the point. according to cringely's article, people were writing to him claiming that UBW would make GPS obsolete. he doesn't go into the details because (he says) he doesn't believe it.
Maybe I can grab all the CD's, bring them home and burn new ones,
chock full'of nice little additions...viruses, bugs, flaws; then put them back, shrinkwrapped and ready to go.
you misspelled "a bootable mandrake linux install cd". HTH. HAND.
I agree with parts of what you said, and see an occasional point of agreement in some of the other threads attached to this article. for example, I agree that the BBS days had more of a local feel than USENET or web communities (because DUH! they were usually local, with the exception of the Illuminati BBS.)
however, I've always had problems with the theory that TV is an isolating force. sure, if someone chooses TV in preference to other activities (and never watches TV with others, or at least never talks while watching TV,) then that person becomes isolated. but even in that case, it's not that TV is an isolating force, but that the couch potato chooses isolation. it would be better to ask why more people are choosing isolation.
I remember reading commentary once about how in the early days of TV and in the radio days before, most of the people you met on the street had seen the same TV show or heard the same radio program you had, so people tended to share a common culture of television and radio; they could talk about what Uncle Milty did last week or about the last episode of Lights Out. it seems that society is fragmenting not because of TV or the internet, but because of increased choice -- you can't count on people having as many shared experiences.
add to that the increased pressures of socializing. believe it or not, people in the '50s or earlier didn't talk to that many more people than today; family, friends, their neighbors, and certain people they did business with regularly (the grocer, the barber, the mailman, the milkman, and so on.) plus, the population was smaller then than now. what is truly different is that we today are forced to talk to more people, either on the phone or when dealing with the government or crowds at the mall or clerks at the various specialty stores we have to visit (compared to one or two stores someone in the '50s would visit.)
and don't forget how many people you have to socialize with if you work for a large company, or if you do any kind of phone support.
so technology is not the isolating factor, really. it's a combination of increased individualization and increased social pressures. TV became more important as an escape valve from having to deal with more and more people every day; its successor, the internet, is also an escape valve, but it allows some buffered socialization that allows you to maintain relationships without constant face-to-face interaction. true, it allows you to maintain relationships with people you may never meet face to face, but it also allows you to meet people face to face that you never would have met otherwise... and this isn't even new; once the postal system was invented, people began corresponding through the mail, leading to famous examples like robert browning's courtship of elizabeth barrett through the mail, or lovecraft's national network of penpals.
it may seem ludicrous to offer annecdotal evidence to contradict a (supposed) social trend, but really that "social trend" is itself based on annecdotal evidence: the examples of geeks who never leave their homes, or of people in big cities who don't know the name of the clerk at the grocery store. for every one of those examples, you could cite a counterexample: geeks who go to visit people met online, or hundreds of small towns that still have that local feel that Jon Katz craves. plus, wasn't there a study released a few months ago (even mentioned here) that proved people were not decreasing their social time to use the internet more, but were rather decreasing their television time?
wasn't someone predicting not too long ago that, because jobs are getting scarcer and automation is becoming more prevalent, companies would start hiring people for 20-30 hour-a-week jobs at the pay scale of 40 hour-a-week jobs? and that all those people with nothing to do in their increased spare time would wind up increasing volunteerism?
maybe the two ideas will be merged. with increased automation, there's less of a need for manual labor, but the one thing machines can't do is socialize. customers always want to talk to a live person.
of course, how well you socialize varies wildly, depending on what's happening in your life these days and on your general mood. this means that you will be moving from job to job more frequently, losing more of that job security mentioned in the review.
I think there's a flaw or two in the theory, however. the book apparently tells us that we will all become more like workers in the third world, but that the internet will help democratize us more and make us more astute on world happenings. we will all magically become citizens of the world; international boundaries will fade in importance.
and yet:
third-world workers struggle to get by and have little chance to become more knowledgable about the outside world
third-world workers, when employed by a business, are treated like dirt
the treatment of third-world workers is just another version of slavery and serfdom, nothing new at all
the multinational corporations like generating insecurity among the potential workforce, because it drives down wages and resistance to wage slavery
the multinationals also like insecurity because it encourages workers - consumers - to buy products as a substitute for security
people with internet access so far have proven to be more likely to spew their narrowminded viewpoints onto a webpage or usenet than to broaden their viewpoints and become part of some international community
here's my vision of the future: more and more people will be paid less and less. the currently privileged jobs will disappear; if you aren't an executive, you are a low-class worker. the multinationals will consolidate power, while national governments will become administrators of local infrastructure like roads, law enforcement and sewage. the insecure masses will flee into various revolutionary or religious factions. a state of perpetual conflict will break out between factions; the wealthy will tend to isolate themselves from the masses, hiring more security guards while retreating to secluded homes to create a buffer between themselves and the world they have created. the internet will become heavily censored, but there will be underground channels for each of the factions.
not very original, I realize, but hey, we've been headed that way for a very long time, and we all know it.
"I mean, humour is humour"
I think that's the problem right there. In America, humour is humor.
so you're saying it loses something in the translation?
hmmm. as for wallace and grommit, everyone I know in america knows who they are, and most people have seen either the cheese holiday or the wrong trousers. among the kind of americans that like animation, wallace and grommit are well-known.
I think the problem is that animation is still frowned upon by the american mainstream. has the simpsons ever won an emmy for best comedy, even when it was the funniest show on TV? or do they just keep giving it emmies for "best voice characterization in an animated series"?
hmmm... Microsoft claims that any operating system using the word "windows" (or something that sounds like that) infringes on their trademark, while Apple claims that calling one of their recent operating systems "Mac OS-9" does not infringe on the trademark Microware has on OS-9... I guess the larger company always wins.
I would recommend that LindowsOS examine the OS-9 case for a couple reasons:
the OS-9 lawsuit was dismissed not because Apple didn't infringe upon the Microware trademark, but rather because of fair use.
fair use is, of course, also why programmers are allowed to release products named WinZip or Windowmaker. if other software companies are allowed to indicate MS Windows compatibility through a similarity of names, why isn't LindowsOS?
OS-9 was release in the '80s and was a windowing operating system. I am certain there were OS-9 products that used the word "Windows".
they might want to check out products related to GeoWorks, too.
didn't Apple buy the right to use the term windows from Xerox PARC?
everyone points to the MacDonalds/McDowells case as proof that LindowsOS infringes on MS Windows, but the cases are not strictly similar. in one, someone is making a look-alike product and trying to trick people into purchasing it using branding (McDowells was pretending to be MacDonalds.) in the other, someone is making a product designed to replace another product.
in other words, if consumers were to confuse LindowsOS with MS Windows, this would hurt LindowsOS; potential customers of LindowsOS have to be aware of MS Windows and want a substitute.
yes, plus those margins are adjustable by the user, as I said. there's no need for margin info in the document unless it's meant to be published, either internally as a training doc (for instance) or externally as a brochure (or something similar.)
elsewhere, I wrote that documents have a three-tiered hierarchy of desirable features:
information
prettiness
printability
information is desirable in any document, prettiness is also desirable in some cases, and printability is necessary in a few.
many people here are pushing RTF, which is good as far as it goes. however, plain text is best for most purposes, like the often-mentioned "writing a letter to your mother" or interoffice memos. when pictures and bold text are necessary, HTML will fit the document's prettiness needs in most cases, although RTF might allow a few more options; the decision on whether to use HTML or RTF really hinges on whether you want hyperlinks.
people keep bringing up print format information, like margins. most of the time, print format information isn't necessary. no one seems to mention that, if someone wants to print a document that doesn't have margins set, it's possible to set the margins when printing.
if exact print formatting is needed, the best portable format is PDF. and there's a nifty GPL program called HTMLDoc that will work just fine for windows users who need stricter format information. I only wish it would read CSS and all kinds of table formats.
I think it's important to seperate the needs of a document into information, prettiness, and printability as I've described, because really you should write all the information first, then go back and make it pretty, then format the pretty document for printing. the universal method these days seems to be to start messing with fonts and margins first, then write what you want to write last, which is why so many books these days are crap. (anyone who buys roleplaying games will know exactly what I'm talking about.)
let's straighten some things out right now, before it gets too confusing. there are three possible desired features for basic documents:
information
prettiness
printability
all documents should have information, but not all need prettiness or printability. if the goal is to take information and present it in an easier-to-read format, with easily-identifiable headings and subheadings, then prettiness becomes important. if, in addition, printouts of the document will be used as something other than rough drafts, printability becomes an issue.
the point I'm trying to make, of course, is that not every document needs the same amount of formatting details. margin information is only necessary for a document that's intended as a final printed product. stuff that's used in a company as an internal reference only doesn't need margin information, just info like bold and italics, and maybe some diagrams. HTML is great for that. if someone wants to print out an HTML doc, they can set their own margins.
but a lot of documents -- email, memos -- do not even need prettiness. they should be done in plain text.
I haven't read any technical specifications on RTF and try not to use MS Word, but I've used WordPad... and I embedded pictures in my documents before.
someone else mentioned that.doc is just an RTF binary format, anyways, so regular RTF should be able to handle graphics.
actual OLE stuff, on the other hand... maybe that won't work, but it's not as great as you would think, since it won't work well cross-platform. but then, who needs it? if you want to embed an excel spreadsheet into a document, convert the spreadsheet to HTML and insert that document into your main document.
I read it. I don't agree. I have no great fondness for rap, hiphop, or techno. however, the fact that music is electronic has nothing to do with how expressive it is.
listen to some tangerine dream sometime... they *did* the "real instrument" thing back in the '60s, became early adopters of electronic instruments, and have done great stuff ever since.
or check out zappa's synclavier stuff (although I have to say I prefer the yellow shark version of "g-spot tornado" to the jazz from hell version.) wendy carlos williams did some good stuff on the synclavier, too.
the only time electronic music loses expressiveness is when the performer treats the instrument as a set of toggle switches instead of a set of sliding, mutable parameters.
so, people who play synths in rock bands aren't real musicians?
before you backpeddle again, allow me to become a telepath and divine your *real* meaning: you are prejudiced against the user interface. despite the fact that there have been numerous innovations in music since the 16th century, you reject anything "new", even if it's older than you.
do you consider musique concrete to be legitimate music? the first musique concrete performances were in the '20s, using grammaphones.
do you consider John Cage to be a real composer? he wrote music to be performed using radios. probably before you were born.
do you consider a theramin to be a real musical instrument? it was used extensively in musical scores for sci-fi flicks in the '50s.
there's a couple whole genres of musicians out there making sounds to entertain themselves and their audiences with methods you probably reject, simply because they were invented post-Bach.
sounds like a personal problem, to me...
that's so 1023 A.D.
hell, musique concrete was invented in the '20s. and John Cage wrote pieces to be performed using a freakin' RADIO. you would think people would get over the "real instrument" hang-up by now...
when I was looking for a more portable solution for my performances, people kept suggesting "rackmount" to me, too. a rackmount isn't my definition of "portable". I went instead with a laptop and a simple mixer from radio shack. the sound quality is fine for me, but then I do experimental music, not techno, so maybe that's an issue.
I've been reading the comments, because I'm always looking for new solutions. my dream is to have a couple small pizza-box-like linux boxen, one as a mixer/recorder, the other as the sound generator, and use the laptop as a control terminal. there were a couple systems mentioned on slashdot in the past that *almost* met my needs, but still nothing that I'm willing to dive into.
Slashdot Mirror
and also, vivendi universal is a member of the MPAA, which is attempting to punish people for using DeCSS... and which also believes that the cd/dvd region system is a completely ethical way of doing business...
ok, since I have never built a cluster or even networked two computers together, I think I'd be a pretty good judge of what looks easy or not.
I looked at the SCL Cluster Cookbook link provided. keeping in mind that I know nothing about networking anyways, I scanned the list of links on that page; most of them looked like glossaries, introductions, intensive hardware discussions, etc., but there was one that jumped right out of the page:
so I clicked it. the resulting page looked like it really could be printed on a single sheet of paper. skimming through it, it looks pretty easy to understand, although I may have to look up stuff on each step to make sure I'm doing it right. (in particular, I would want to look up how to configure one of the servers as an NFS server and read the instructions for installing MPICH.)
so I would say that, although ease-of-use could always be improved, one-page directions on how to set up a linux cluster definitely do exist and do not look that hard.
ah, here is the problem: you have to begin the line with "begin" followed by TWO spaces. not something that happens too frequently by accident.
microsoft has changed their support.microsoft.com interface again in an attempt to prevent people from fixing their own problems, but if you look up the following Q number, you can find the information: Q265230.
nor could I... I currently use Outlook Express 5, because I haven't taken the time to set up GNU Emacs for reading my mail. according to his message, early versions of OE have this bug, while newer versions keep the bug but remove "view source" as a workaround.
I sent myself a message that began with normal text, then added a line that said "BEGIN test". I received it fine -- it doesn't even put the text into an attachment.
I think he's confused. I do remember hearing about the bug, but only in relation to Outlook (not OE.) his reference to the fact that the bug disappears when the destination is on an exchange server seems to verify this; OE does POP3, IMAP and HTTP mail servers but not exchange.
I think that was the point. according to cringely's article, people were writing to him claiming that UBW would make GPS obsolete. he doesn't go into the details because (he says) he doesn't believe it.
you misspelled "a bootable mandrake linux install cd". HTH. HAND.
I agree with parts of what you said, and see an occasional point of agreement in some of the other threads attached to this article. for example, I agree that the BBS days had more of a local feel than USENET or web communities (because DUH! they were usually local, with the exception of the Illuminati BBS.)
however, I've always had problems with the theory that TV is an isolating force. sure, if someone chooses TV in preference to other activities (and never watches TV with others, or at least never talks while watching TV,) then that person becomes isolated. but even in that case, it's not that TV is an isolating force, but that the couch potato chooses isolation. it would be better to ask why more people are choosing isolation.
I remember reading commentary once about how in the early days of TV and in the radio days before, most of the people you met on the street had seen the same TV show or heard the same radio program you had, so people tended to share a common culture of television and radio; they could talk about what Uncle Milty did last week or about the last episode of Lights Out. it seems that society is fragmenting not because of TV or the internet, but because of increased choice -- you can't count on people having as many shared experiences.
add to that the increased pressures of socializing. believe it or not, people in the '50s or earlier didn't talk to that many more people than today; family, friends, their neighbors, and certain people they did business with regularly (the grocer, the barber, the mailman, the milkman, and so on.) plus, the population was smaller then than now. what is truly different is that we today are forced to talk to more people, either on the phone or when dealing with the government or crowds at the mall or clerks at the various specialty stores we have to visit (compared to one or two stores someone in the '50s would visit.)
and don't forget how many people you have to socialize with if you work for a large company, or if you do any kind of phone support.
so technology is not the isolating factor, really. it's a combination of increased individualization and increased social pressures. TV became more important as an escape valve from having to deal with more and more people every day; its successor, the internet, is also an escape valve, but it allows some buffered socialization that allows you to maintain relationships without constant face-to-face interaction. true, it allows you to maintain relationships with people you may never meet face to face, but it also allows you to meet people face to face that you never would have met otherwise ... and this isn't even new; once the postal system was invented, people began corresponding through the mail, leading to famous examples like robert browning's courtship of elizabeth barrett through the mail, or lovecraft's national network of penpals.
it may seem ludicrous to offer annecdotal evidence to contradict a (supposed) social trend, but really that "social trend" is itself based on annecdotal evidence: the examples of geeks who never leave their homes, or of people in big cities who don't know the name of the clerk at the grocery store. for every one of those examples, you could cite a counterexample: geeks who go to visit people met online, or hundreds of small towns that still have that local feel that Jon Katz craves. plus, wasn't there a study released a few months ago (even mentioned here) that proved people were not decreasing their social time to use the internet more, but were rather decreasing their television time?
wasn't someone predicting not too long ago that, because jobs are getting scarcer and automation is becoming more prevalent, companies would start hiring people for 20-30 hour-a-week jobs at the pay scale of 40 hour-a-week jobs? and that all those people with nothing to do in their increased spare time would wind up increasing volunteerism?
maybe the two ideas will be merged. with increased automation, there's less of a need for manual labor, but the one thing machines can't do is socialize. customers always want to talk to a live person.
of course, how well you socialize varies wildly, depending on what's happening in your life these days and on your general mood. this means that you will be moving from job to job more frequently, losing more of that job security mentioned in the review.
I think there's a flaw or two in the theory, however. the book apparently tells us that we will all become more like workers in the third world, but that the internet will help democratize us more and make us more astute on world happenings. we will all magically become citizens of the world; international boundaries will fade in importance.
and yet:
here's my vision of the future: more and more people will be paid less and less. the currently privileged jobs will disappear; if you aren't an executive, you are a low-class worker. the multinationals will consolidate power, while national governments will become administrators of local infrastructure like roads, law enforcement and sewage. the insecure masses will flee into various revolutionary or religious factions. a state of perpetual conflict will break out between factions; the wealthy will tend to isolate themselves from the masses, hiring more security guards while retreating to secluded homes to create a buffer between themselves and the world they have created. the internet will become heavily censored, but there will be underground channels for each of the factions.
not very original, I realize, but hey, we've been headed that way for a very long time, and we all know it.
so you're saying it loses something in the translation?
hmmm. as for wallace and grommit, everyone I know in america knows who they are, and most people have seen either the cheese holiday or the wrong trousers. among the kind of americans that like animation, wallace and grommit are well-known.
I think the problem is that animation is still frowned upon by the american mainstream. has the simpsons ever won an emmy for best comedy, even when it was the funniest show on TV? or do they just keep giving it emmies for "best voice characterization in an animated series"?
ooops, I meant to include a link to info on the Apple/OS-9 lawsuit.
Court dismisses `OS-9' suithmmm... Microsoft claims that any operating system using the word "windows" (or something that sounds like that) infringes on their trademark, while Apple claims that calling one of their recent operating systems "Mac OS-9" does not infringe on the trademark Microware has on OS-9... I guess the larger company always wins.
I would recommend that LindowsOS examine the OS-9 case for a couple reasons:
fair use is, of course, also why programmers are allowed to release products named WinZip or Windowmaker. if other software companies are allowed to indicate MS Windows compatibility through a similarity of names, why isn't LindowsOS?
they might want to check out products related to GeoWorks, too.
everyone points to the MacDonalds/McDowells case as proof that LindowsOS infringes on MS Windows, but the cases are not strictly similar. in one, someone is making a look-alike product and trying to trick people into purchasing it using branding (McDowells was pretending to be MacDonalds.) in the other, someone is making a product designed to replace another product.
in other words, if consumers were to confuse LindowsOS with MS Windows, this would hurt LindowsOS; potential customers of LindowsOS have to be aware of MS Windows and want a substitute.
yes, plus those margins are adjustable by the user, as I said. there's no need for margin info in the document unless it's meant to be published, either internally as a training doc (for instance) or externally as a brochure (or something similar.)
elsewhere, I wrote that documents have a three-tiered hierarchy of desirable features:
information is desirable in any document, prettiness is also desirable in some cases, and printability is necessary in a few.
many people here are pushing RTF, which is good as far as it goes. however, plain text is best for most purposes, like the often-mentioned "writing a letter to your mother" or interoffice memos. when pictures and bold text are necessary, HTML will fit the document's prettiness needs in most cases, although RTF might allow a few more options; the decision on whether to use HTML or RTF really hinges on whether you want hyperlinks.
people keep bringing up print format information, like margins. most of the time, print format information isn't necessary. no one seems to mention that, if someone wants to print a document that doesn't have margins set, it's possible to set the margins when printing.
if exact print formatting is needed, the best portable format is PDF. and there's a nifty GPL program called HTMLDoc that will work just fine for windows users who need stricter format information. I only wish it would read CSS and all kinds of table formats.
I think it's important to seperate the needs of a document into information, prettiness, and printability as I've described, because really you should write all the information first, then go back and make it pretty, then format the pretty document for printing. the universal method these days seems to be to start messing with fonts and margins first, then write what you want to write last, which is why so many books these days are crap. (anyone who buys roleplaying games will know exactly what I'm talking about.)
let's straighten some things out right now, before it gets too confusing. there are three possible desired features for basic documents:
all documents should have information, but not all need prettiness or printability. if the goal is to take information and present it in an easier-to-read format, with easily-identifiable headings and subheadings, then prettiness becomes important. if, in addition, printouts of the document will be used as something other than rough drafts, printability becomes an issue.
the point I'm trying to make, of course, is that not every document needs the same amount of formatting details. margin information is only necessary for a document that's intended as a final printed product. stuff that's used in a company as an internal reference only doesn't need margin information, just info like bold and italics, and maybe some diagrams. HTML is great for that. if someone wants to print out an HTML doc, they can set their own margins.
but a lot of documents -- email, memos -- do not even need prettiness. they should be done in plain text.
I haven't read any technical specifications on RTF and try not to use MS Word, but I've used WordPad ... and I embedded pictures in my documents before.
someone else mentioned that .doc is just an RTF binary format, anyways, so regular RTF should be able to handle graphics.
actual OLE stuff, on the other hand ... maybe that won't work, but it's not as great as you would think, since it won't work well cross-platform. but then, who needs it? if you want to embed an excel spreadsheet into a document, convert the spreadsheet to HTML and insert that document into your main document.
I read it. I don't agree. I have no great fondness for rap, hiphop, or techno. however, the fact that music is electronic has nothing to do with how expressive it is.
listen to some tangerine dream sometime ... they *did* the "real instrument" thing back in the '60s, became early adopters of electronic instruments, and have done great stuff ever since.
or check out zappa's synclavier stuff (although I have to say I prefer the yellow shark version of "g-spot tornado" to the jazz from hell version.) wendy carlos williams did some good stuff on the synclavier, too.
the only time electronic music loses expressiveness is when the performer treats the instrument as a set of toggle switches instead of a set of sliding, mutable parameters.
so, people who play synths in rock bands aren't real musicians? before you backpeddle again, allow me to become a telepath and divine your *real* meaning: you are prejudiced against the user interface. despite the fact that there have been numerous innovations in music since the 16th century, you reject anything "new", even if it's older than you. do you consider musique concrete to be legitimate music? the first musique concrete performances were in the '20s, using grammaphones. do you consider John Cage to be a real composer? he wrote music to be performed using radios. probably before you were born. do you consider a theramin to be a real musical instrument? it was used extensively in musical scores for sci-fi flicks in the '50s. there's a couple whole genres of musicians out there making sounds to entertain themselves and their audiences with methods you probably reject, simply because they were invented post-Bach. sounds like a personal problem, to me...
since when is a man a musical instrument? what do you do, beat your chest like a drum?
that's so 1023 A.D. hell, musique concrete was invented in the '20s. and John Cage wrote pieces to be performed using a freakin' RADIO. you would think people would get over the "real instrument" hang-up by now...
when I was looking for a more portable solution for my performances, people kept suggesting "rackmount" to me, too. a rackmount isn't my definition of "portable". I went instead with a laptop and a simple mixer from radio shack. the sound quality is fine for me, but then I do experimental music, not techno, so maybe that's an issue. I've been reading the comments, because I'm always looking for new solutions. my dream is to have a couple small pizza-box-like linux boxen, one as a mixer/recorder, the other as the sound generator, and use the laptop as a control terminal. there were a couple systems mentioned on slashdot in the past that *almost* met my needs, but still nothing that I'm willing to dive into.