Even technical books have benefit in dead-tree form. I greatly prefer my reference manuals to sit on my desk when I'm programming...
Generally speaking, I agree with you. I have a dozen or so out-of-print and copyright-expired vacuum tube textbooks in PDF form, but I crave the physical books. However, in terms of programming, I greatly perfer electronic copies, as long as I can cut'n'paste sample code. That little convinience makes the electronic version worthwhile.
Audio books are excellent time-fillers for long car trips, where reading a traditional book would give me motion-sickness.
Agreed. My wife and I have listened to a few audiobooks on the trip to LA from SF and back. Great way to pass the time. Unfortunately, some books are better narrated than others, as some have mentioned. Steve Martin's "The Pleasure Of My Company" and Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" are well done. But Ludlum's "Bourne Identity" and "Bourne Supremecy" are often incoherent... the narrator sometimes speaks in a quiet, deep mumble which gets lost in the background music and road noise. They were also abridged, which irks me; I want the whole story, esp. at the bookshelf prices these things go for.
What radio dramas to you recommend? I'm aware of and enjoy THHGTTG, of course, but what else?
By the way go fuck yourself with yoru smarmy attitude OK?
You might want to see a doctor about that stick up your ass. I get what you're saying and I agree. You're just acting like an asshole. Sadly, that propmts me to act like an asshole towards you in return.
My first reply to you was a joke; ref. those psuedo-HTML "funny" wrappers on the text. I don't know why you decided to take such a bad attitude towards me when you replied. Perhaps you think I was personally insulting you? I do know that what ticked me off was the lame assumptions you made about me.
Your "I'm doing better work than you are" demeanor just reeks, especially when you have no idea whether I'm addressing low-latency kernal issues (I'm not) or some punk skript kiddie (I'm not). Nice job with that one, not that my own assuptions about your 24-hour Linux dedication are any better.
The problem is that your attitude ifnects others to do the same. TO sit on the sidelines with their hands out whining.
Sorry, if you knew me, you'd know that I don't have hands-- they were chopped off in a freak photocopier / skillsaw accident a year ago. Very messy. Blood, collated paper, and diamond powder everywhere. So I'm not sitting here with my hands out. Just these freaky stumps...
No, wait, that's not true. Sorry.
I know for sure you also spend hours and hours every day watching tv, what would happen if you gave up half an hour of tv per day to go help some project?
You might note that in my previous post, I was being humorous, not sardonic. I don't care enough about computers to spend all my non-work hours on them. I'm a software developer by profession, so I get plenty of computer time at work, and it's more than satisfying. I spend the rest of my time rounding out my life by cooking, reading, toying with audio hardware (the classic analog kind, yum!), and doing crossword puzzles. And yes, I watch TV with my wife. Why? Because we snuggle up on the couch and share some intimate time.
You see, I've yet to find any FOSS project that could make a proper chicken and mushroom dinner, expound on life ala Burgess or Orwell, make a kick drum properly shake my ass, or answer "Sad underwater collective?" in 14 letters. Much less give me that deeply satisfying feeling of love over a shared giggle at Megan Mullally on "Will & Grace". I hope you'll forgive me my egregious TV watching habits. But if I gave that up, I'd probably be an even bigger bitchy asshole.
But just to make sure you're thoroughly pleased, yes, when I do talk about computers with friends and family, I evangelize about BSD, Linux, the GIMP, Firefox, etc. So yes, I do "contribute". I just don't let it take over my life.
Now, bugger off with your holier-than-thou attitude, get a sense of humor, and go "contribute" something.
[funny] My last contribution was a bit of TCL code some 10 years ago. Am I the reason that Linux hasn't made it to the desktop yet? Damn! Sorry guys... I'll get right on that, after I finish preventing wildfires and a few other projects I've got under my belt. [/funny]
Says gp: Learn how to! Programming is not difficult...
Says NormalVisual: It's rather like expecting some random guy to be able to pick up a violin and with a little bit of practice, come out sounding like Itzak Perlman.
Says I: Thank you, I couldn't have said it better myself.
but things have changed since then. samplitude, paris, digital performer, and a host of other commercial DAWs have been steadily digging into the protools market, as well as becoming the entry choice for those who are still coming over from non-software systems.
Speaking as a former PARIS owner / user, I think you're overestimating. PARIS has been effectively dead for quite a few years now; no new hardware is sold, and while there is a little growth in the software by hackers, the user base is only shrinking. Yes, it did sound great, but it didn't make much of a dent in the DAW market.
PT will continue to grow with the aquisition and integration of M-Audio. No, you're not going to loose Ableton Live, and other DAWs are gaining ground, but I'd wager that's refelctive of an overall growth in the industry, not a conquering of the PT share.
I did say "any cards worth spending money on", you know...
How about any of the MoTU line, my old Ensoniq PARIS system, or just about any firewire-based interface? Last I checked the audio-dev mail lists, about a year ago, firewire had barely been scratched at, and there are a lot of great-sounding cards with a firewire interface, happily chugging away on Windows and OS-X. The ALSA website doesn't have updates since March 2005, and still I don't see the Echo, MoTU, or MAudio firewire devices.
I am impressed by ALSA's apparent support of other Echo interfaces, though. That seems to have grown quite a bit.
Any why would you want to record a guitar directly into a computer anyway? MIC THE AMP, BOY, MIC THE AMP!
Because when inspiration strikes at 3:30am and your spouse is asleep in the next room, just about any amp is too loud. Even 5W kills at full-tilt distortion. Ten watts is more than enough to rattle doors. Sure, you could get a Weber MASS or something to bring down the volume, but then it's kinda hard to hear what you're doing.
I'm not saying that a modeler will sound better, I'm just saying that sometimes, DI'ing has its uses. And you can always stick that MuRF between your guitar and your DI / computer.
1. Buy your new TV set broadcast-flag compatible 2. Go Canada (or beyond Mexico) 3. Disable the broadcast flag 4. Get back home
Good thought. However, that's technically illegal as per the DMCA:
"No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that controls access to a (copyrighted) work." - DMCA, Section 1201
(Emphasis added.) So you could bring your TV out of the country and rig it up, but you couldn't bring it back. Realistically, I can't imagine that this isn't enforcable. (At the same time, I don't relish the idea of sticking a huge TV in the back of my car and driving 12+ hours...)
Now, you could drop a load of cash on an video editting suite that happened ignore the Broadcast Flag while importing or capturing signals, and that would be legal, as copyright circumvention isn't the primary purpose. Or that's the way that I read it.
While many of the cuts listed are bad, others aren't so bad either.
No disagreement. I don't understand all of the budget matters; I was quoting from the MoveOn press release to get people interested and aware (one way or the other). My personal opinion is that the goverment is taking efforts to eliminate a few of the better-spent dollars (PBS/CPB, CDC, AIDS prevention and Peace Corps funding, Energy Star, etc.) and that there are some good cuts (NASA, pinile implants, Congress pay increase rollback, etc.).
Now's the time to tack it onto a Katrina spending bill. Republican and Democrat alike will be _forced_ to vote for it
Perhaps you think you're making a joke? Sadly, you're not too far off the mark. Lots of vitally important government spending is being cut to make room for (needed) Katrina money. I'm not saying that we shouldn't dump boatloads of money into the rebuilding process, but rather that we need to seriously look at where it's coming from. (I'd start with recalling Bush's tax cuts for the upper 1%.) MoveOn.org has the details... this is a snippet from an email (editted for layout):
The excess the Republicans' proposed cuts is almost unbelievable. You can read the full proposal here. Here are just some of the most egregious cuts: $225 billion cut from Medicaid, the last-resort health insurance program for the very poor. $200 billion cut from Medicare, the health care safety net for the elderly and the disabled. $25 billion cut from the Centers for Disease Control $6.7 billion cut from school lunches for poor children $7.5 cut from programs to fight global AIDS $5.5 billion to eliminate all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting $3.6 billion cut to eliminate the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities $8.5 billion cut to eliminate all subsidized loans to graduate students. $2.5 bullion cut from Amtrak $2.5 billion to eliminate the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative $417 million cut to eliminate the Minority Business Development Agency $4.8 billion cut to eliminate all funding for the Safe and Drug-Free schools program And the list goes on and on.
This is something that needs attention from our (sorry to non-US/.ers) house and senate representatives. MoveOn has an online petition, but I'd highly recommend calling your representatives directly. You can find your senator and represenatives (with your zip code) online.
Because sometimes only one character in oh, say a regex needs to be changed.
Ah, so the 'r' command is stacked with something else-- you're doing a regex search across some or all of the document, and doing a single-letter replace. That makes much more sense.
"one time I had forgotten the key sequence to quit emacs"
That's not too hard:
Ctrl-X,Ctrl-C
Well, the whole point is if you don't remember it, it is way hard!:-)
No doubt. But oddly enough, after a good 10 years of NOT using EMACS (happily coding away in various IDEs), I still remember Ctrl-X,Ctrl-C. And it's not like I remember lots of EMACS commands; that one is just stuck.
On the same token, who've thought of Alt-F4 to quit an application? Or the ESC key to navigate text? It's a weird, weird, weird world we hack in.
What if when the search bar appeared the page would automatically be scrolled down so that the on screen position of most of the text would not move and instead it'd would be like the search is just covering the top two lines?
OK... what happens when you have less than a full browser-window-space worth of content? If you stick the search bar at the top, and obscure the first few lines, then you necessitate a scrollbar to get to the top-- but you shouldn't have a scrollbar with less than a full browser-window-space worth of content!
No, the search bar belongs exactly where it is: at the bottom.
For the price of an MPC3000, I can get [NI Kontakt], Apogee conversion, build a new PC, and buy any set of control surfaces I feel like.
But if you're touring, there's the unfortunate two-part trade-off of having 1) less-roadworthy components, and 2) many more seperate pieces to keep track of. Everything is a compromise in one way or another.
You mentioned latency in the Akai MPC1000. Are you talking about the pads? I've never heard anyone complain about delays with those... or any other aspect, for that matter.
My worst: Getting pissed off at the computer because it freezed at the wrong time and attempting to throw it. It did not have a cover and all I managed to do was rip the pads of my index and ring finger on my left hand. It took over 2 hours, 6 needles and 15 stitches to fix it.
Nice. My worst computer injury stems from me stomping up and down on the computer until it broke open, picking it up and ripping out the PSU, motherboard, cards, and drives with my bare hands, then placing the jagged empty case on my head, and running into a crowd of people. Had lots of cuts on my hands, scalp, forehead, and ears.
Oh, did I mention that I was in a performance art band at the time? Does that still count?:)
I'd wager that the original comment was referring to rap as the whole deal-- words, beats, etc.
Dropping a breakbeat track behind it does NOT make it music.
One definition of music (at least, acording to Princeton University) is "an artistic form of auditory communication incorporating instrumental or vocal tones in a structured and continuous manner". By that manner, you could ignore the drums, bass, etc. entirely and call it music, as the vocals are delivered in a structured manner (i.e., following a rythem).
The written lyrics themselves may be poetry, but the delivery makes it music. Were the lyrics simply spoken alout, ala Charlton Heston's delivery of Ice-T / Body Count's "Cop Killer", I'd agree. The fact that there is (usually) a instrumental facet reenforces the music aspect of rap.
I'll not argue your tastes, but I will say that it is music.
Slashdot Mirror
Even technical books have benefit in dead-tree form. I greatly prefer my reference manuals to sit on my desk when I'm programming...
Generally speaking, I agree with you. I have a dozen or so out-of-print and copyright-expired vacuum tube textbooks in PDF form, but I crave the physical books. However, in terms of programming, I greatly perfer electronic copies, as long as I can cut'n'paste sample code. That little convinience makes the electronic version worthwhile.
Audio books are excellent time-fillers for long car trips, where reading a traditional book would give me motion-sickness.
Agreed. My wife and I have listened to a few audiobooks on the trip to LA from SF and back. Great way to pass the time. Unfortunately, some books are better narrated than others, as some have mentioned. Steve Martin's "The Pleasure Of My Company" and Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" are well done. But Ludlum's "Bourne Identity" and "Bourne Supremecy" are often incoherent... the narrator sometimes speaks in a quiet, deep mumble which gets lost in the background music and road noise. They were also abridged, which irks me; I want the whole story, esp. at the bookshelf prices these things go for.
What radio dramas to you recommend? I'm aware of and enjoy THHGTTG, of course, but what else?
Fuck off with your smarmy attitude.
OK. I hope you find happiness, and have a wonderful day!!
By the way go fuck yourself with yoru smarmy attitude OK?
You might want to see a doctor about that stick up your ass. I get what you're saying and I agree. You're just acting like an asshole. Sadly, that propmts me to act like an asshole towards you in return.
My first reply to you was a joke; ref. those psuedo-HTML "funny" wrappers on the text. I don't know why you decided to take such a bad attitude towards me when you replied. Perhaps you think I was personally insulting you? I do know that what ticked me off was the lame assumptions you made about me.
Your "I'm doing better work than you are" demeanor just reeks, especially when you have no idea whether I'm addressing low-latency kernal issues (I'm not) or some punk skript kiddie (I'm not). Nice job with that one, not that my own assuptions about your 24-hour Linux dedication are any better.
The problem is that your attitude ifnects others to do the same. TO sit on the sidelines with their hands out whining.
Sorry, if you knew me, you'd know that I don't have hands-- they were chopped off in a freak photocopier / skillsaw accident a year ago. Very messy. Blood, collated paper, and diamond powder everywhere. So I'm not sitting here with my hands out. Just these freaky stumps...
No, wait, that's not true. Sorry.
I know for sure you also spend hours and hours every day watching tv, what would happen if you gave up half an hour of tv per day to go help some project?
You might note that in my previous post, I was being humorous, not sardonic. I don't care enough about computers to spend all my non-work hours on them. I'm a software developer by profession, so I get plenty of computer time at work, and it's more than satisfying. I spend the rest of my time rounding out my life by cooking, reading, toying with audio hardware (the classic analog kind, yum!), and doing crossword puzzles. And yes, I watch TV with my wife. Why? Because we snuggle up on the couch and share some intimate time.
You see, I've yet to find any FOSS project that could make a proper chicken and mushroom dinner, expound on life ala Burgess or Orwell, make a kick drum properly shake my ass, or answer "Sad underwater collective?" in 14 letters. Much less give me that deeply satisfying feeling of love over a shared giggle at Megan Mullally on "Will & Grace". I hope you'll forgive me my egregious TV watching habits. But if I gave that up, I'd probably be an even bigger bitchy asshole.
But just to make sure you're thoroughly pleased, yes, when I do talk about computers with friends and family, I evangelize about BSD, Linux, the GIMP, Firefox, etc. So yes, I do "contribute". I just don't let it take over my life.
Now, bugger off with your holier-than-thou attitude, get a sense of humor, and go "contribute" something.
Open source only works when YOU contribute.
[funny]
My last contribution was a bit of TCL code some 10 years ago. Am I the reason that Linux hasn't made it to the desktop yet? Damn! Sorry guys... I'll get right on that, after I finish preventing wildfires and a few other projects I've got under my belt.
[/funny]
Says gp:
Learn how to! Programming is not difficult...
Says NormalVisual:
It's rather like expecting some random guy to be able to pick up a violin and with a little bit of practice, come out sounding like Itzak Perlman.
Says I:
Thank you, I couldn't have said it better myself.
but things have changed since then. samplitude, paris, digital performer, and a host of other commercial DAWs have been steadily digging into the protools market, as well as becoming the entry choice for those who are still coming over from non-software systems.
Speaking as a former PARIS owner / user, I think you're overestimating. PARIS has been effectively dead for quite a few years now; no new hardware is sold, and while there is a little growth in the software by hackers, the user base is only shrinking. Yes, it did sound great, but it didn't make much of a dent in the DAW market.
PT will continue to grow with the aquisition and integration of M-Audio. No, you're not going to loose Ableton Live, and other DAWs are gaining ground, but I'd wager that's refelctive of an overall growth in the industry, not a conquering of the PT share.
I did say "any cards worth spending money on", you know...
How about any of the MoTU line, my old Ensoniq PARIS system, or just about any firewire-based interface? Last I checked the audio-dev mail lists, about a year ago, firewire had barely been scratched at, and there are a lot of great-sounding cards with a firewire interface, happily chugging away on Windows and OS-X. The ALSA website doesn't have updates since March 2005, and still I don't see the Echo, MoTU, or MAudio firewire devices.
I am impressed by ALSA's apparent support of other Echo interfaces, though. That seems to have grown quite a bit.
Any why would you want to record a guitar directly into a computer anyway? MIC THE AMP, BOY, MIC THE AMP!
Because when inspiration strikes at 3:30am and your spouse is asleep in the next room, just about any amp is too loud. Even 5W kills at full-tilt distortion. Ten watts is more than enough to rattle doors. Sure, you could get a Weber MASS or something to bring down the volume, but then it's kinda hard to hear what you're doing.
I'm not saying that a modeler will sound better, I'm just saying that sometimes, DI'ing has its uses. And you can always stick that MuRF between your guitar and your DI / computer.
I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who read the article headline like that.
At 6:30am I ... drive my Hummer to work, ... At 8:15pm I arrive at work...
Wow, 13 hours and 45 minutes to get to work! That's one HELL of a commute!
And who in $#%^@#$^@@'s name came up with the name PIC ? PIC is a microcontroller, always has been and in the tech people's mind always will be :D.
You pointed out that it's not for techs, so what does it matter if the name already used by a technical product?
2. Go Canada (or beyond Mexico)
3. Disable the broadcast flag
4. Get back home
Good thought. However, that's technically illegal as per the DMCA:
(Emphasis added.) So you could bring your TV out of the country and rig it up, but you couldn't bring it back. Realistically, I can't imagine that this isn't enforcable. (At the same time, I don't relish the idea of sticking a huge TV in the back of my car and driving 12+ hours...)
Now, you could drop a load of cash on an video editting suite that happened ignore the Broadcast Flag while importing or capturing signals, and that would be legal, as copyright circumvention isn't the primary purpose. Or that's the way that I read it.
Only slightly off topic-does anyone else find the fact that Congress is allowed to "bundle" legislation like this distasteful?
Yes. Very much so. It muddles the entire process.
While many of the cuts listed are bad, others aren't so bad either.
No disagreement. I don't understand all of the budget matters; I was quoting from the MoveOn press release to get people interested and aware (one way or the other). My personal opinion is that the goverment is taking efforts to eliminate a few of the better-spent dollars (PBS/CPB, CDC, AIDS prevention and Peace Corps funding, Energy Star, etc.) and that there are some good cuts (NASA, pinile implants, Congress pay increase rollback, etc.).
Perhaps you think you're making a joke? Sadly, you're not too far off the mark. Lots of vitally important government spending is being cut to make room for (needed) Katrina money. I'm not saying that we shouldn't dump boatloads of money into the rebuilding process, but rather that we need to seriously look at where it's coming from. (I'd start with recalling Bush's tax cuts for the upper 1%.) MoveOn.org has the details... this is a snippet from an email (editted for layout):
The NY Times also has coverage.
This is something that needs attention from our (sorry to non-US
Because sometimes only one character in oh, say a regex needs to be changed.
Ah, so the 'r' command is stacked with something else-- you're doing a regex search across some or all of the document, and doing a single-letter replace. That makes much more sense.
"one time I had forgotten the key sequence to quit emacs"
That's not too hard:
Ctrl-X,Ctrl-C
Well, the whole point is if you don't remember it, it is way hard!
No doubt. But oddly enough, after a good 10 years of NOT using EMACS (happily coding away in various IDEs), I still remember Ctrl-X,Ctrl-C. And it's not like I remember lots of EMACS commands; that one is just stuck.
On the same token, who've thought of Alt-F4 to quit an application? Or the ESC key to navigate text? It's a weird, weird, weird world we hack in.
And vi uses nice easy to remember commands like... r to replace a character...
Why do you need a command to replace a single character?
Firefox 1.5 has drag and drop tab reordering.
Hoorah!! I've been wanting this... (Not enough to try the beta, but more than enough to keep up-to-date with stable versions.)
What if when the search bar appeared the page would automatically be scrolled down so that the on screen position of most of the text would not move and instead it'd would be like the search is just covering the top two lines?
OK... what happens when you have less than a full browser-window-space worth of content? If you stick the search bar at the top, and obscure the first few lines, then you necessitate a scrollbar to get to the top-- but you shouldn't have a scrollbar with less than a full browser-window-space worth of content!
No, the search bar belongs exactly where it is: at the bottom.
For the price of an MPC3000, I can get [NI Kontakt], Apogee conversion, build a new PC, and buy any set of control surfaces I feel like.
But if you're touring, there's the unfortunate two-part trade-off of having 1) less-roadworthy components, and 2) many more seperate pieces to keep track of. Everything is a compromise in one way or another.
You mentioned latency in the Akai MPC1000. Are you talking about the pads? I've never heard anyone complain about delays with those... or any other aspect, for that matter.
My worst: Getting pissed off at the computer because it freezed at the wrong time and attempting to throw it. It did not have a cover and all I managed to do was rip the pads of my index and ring finger on my left hand. It took over 2 hours, 6 needles and 15 stitches to fix it.
:)
Nice. My worst computer injury stems from me stomping up and down on the computer until it broke open, picking it up and ripping out the PSU, motherboard, cards, and drives with my bare hands, then placing the jagged empty case on my head, and running into a crowd of people. Had lots of cuts on my hands, scalp, forehead, and ears.
Oh, did I mention that I was in a performance art band at the time? Does that still count?
Rap is not music. It's spoken word/poetry.
I'd wager that the original comment was referring to rap as the whole deal-- words, beats, etc.
Dropping a breakbeat track behind it does NOT make it music.
One definition of music (at least, acording to Princeton University) is "an artistic form of auditory communication incorporating instrumental or vocal tones in a structured and continuous manner". By that manner, you could ignore the drums, bass, etc. entirely and call it music, as the vocals are delivered in a structured manner (i.e., following a rythem).
The written lyrics themselves may be poetry, but the delivery makes it music. Were the lyrics simply spoken alout, ala Charlton Heston's delivery of Ice-T / Body Count's "Cop Killer", I'd agree. The fact that there is (usually) a instrumental facet reenforces the music aspect of rap.
I'll not argue your tastes, but I will say that it is music.