The TL;DR version of this: "I can read a legend.":-)
And I'm not saying you have to go quite as dense as what you would get with a physical map -- being interactive does buy you a lot. I just thing Google Maps swings way way too far the other direction. For instance, in my mind Bing Maps strikes a significantly better balance between being not to cluttered and still having increased information density -- and I'd like to see even that pushed a little more.
As for styling them differently, using a new color seems confusing without also adding a legend.
I guess what I really want you guys to do is add a legend.:-)
A different road color could mean the highway is more/less prominent or (in some areas) a seasonal route.
Well, I also think these should be better indicated. For instance, read the first part of my post here, comparing the view of Google Maps to Bing.
Let's see if I can explain my main gripes with Google Maps. This is long, so if you actually read it I thank you (and it's pretty cool that you responded in the first place, BTW... maybe you can convince people to add an "informative map" view:-)). And don't take it too personally; I whine about software a lot, and Google Maps is kinda software.:-)
Viewed on my 1080p 22" monitor, the scale of this map appears at roughly the same real size as it does in my Rand McNally road atlas. Google's is actually about 60% bigger, which just adds strength to my arguments. (The distance from Platteville to the Madison Capitol building is 11.3mm on screen and 7.2mm on paper.) On the Google map, I can discern two kinds of roads: limited access highways and other highways. In the atlas, that cross section has limited access highways, other multilane highways, principle highways, other through highways, and other roads (reading off their key). In other areas of the country toll roads would also be visible, and presumably in others there would also be unpaved roads. (It's in the legend but I don't know where it ever appears.) On Google's map, there are 12 unique route markers visible. On Rand McNally's, I picked a somewhat random 1 inch by 1 inch square; it had 8. (The square was around House on the Rock and Talesin, two things that aren't on Google's map.)
If we zoom in one notch, a bunch of additional roads appear. (In fairness, there are now far more roads than appear on the Rand McNally atlas.) But there's no distinction between them. On that map, County Road H ("other road (conditions vary -- local inquiry suggested)" in the atlas legend) appears to me exactly the same as US-18 east of Dodgeville ("principle highway"), except that the latter has a route designator at that zoom level. You have to zoom in again before the route designators for the county highways (or WI-23 going north from Dodgeville ("other through highway")) appear -- two levels in from "60% larger than printed atlas".
Now let's compare to Bing. (I don't actually know how this'll go; we'll see.) At nearly the same zoom level as the first Google map we looked at (11.5mm from Platteville to central Madison, probably within my measurement error from Google's 11.3), Bing is missing several roads that appear on Google's. On the other hand, it has many more town names (like Monticello and New Glarus). If we zoom in once, they seem to have about the same roads on them, though the're a little hard to see on Bing's map and I actually had to zoom in again to actually establish that they are, in fact, roads. But we do see that WI-23 north of Dodgeville is decidedly indicated as a more major road than a lot of the county roads (the whisker-thin lines) and yet less than US-18 and US-151. Interestingly, US-18 west of Dodgeville is marked as a noticably more major road than it appears in either Google Map
Not dozens of road types, hundreds of various symbols etc that you see in some road maps
And this is my problem with it; you say "the philosophy is simplicity and clarity", I say "the philosophy is have far less information" and then dispute the "clarity" part.
Here's another example; I'll just compare to Bing maps because I like them the best (in no small part because they seem to be the closest to printed maps). Compare this to this. (Durrr, I can link the maps directly, I don't need to take a screenshot and upload them.)
On Bing's map, the distinction between the main routes through the area (US 65 and US 412) and others is very clear. It's there in Google's, but it's far far less pronounced. Furthermore, Bing makes a distinction between AR-7 (going south from Harrison) and US-62 (upper-left corner, where US-412 turns south), versus the other roads that are shown on the map, like AR-43 and AR-397. That distinction isn't visible on Google's at all.
Without a legend you don't know what kind of roads those are, but from the information there you can at least get a good sense of what are likely to be major routes.
And that also provides a good illustration of my counter argument to your "clarity" statement. To me, the distinctions made on the Bing map actually make it much easier to read... the Google version comparatively just looks like a big jumble of roads.
When you do actually want to see a route, you are told which roads are toll roads, and you can have option to adjust and avoid them.
But... it's not just that! If you want to say "are there decent toll-free routes" you have to try a bunch of things. With an actually good road map, you just look. Furthermore, it's not just a matter of "toll roads are A-OK!" and "avoid toll roads"; one part may have an easily-avoidable toll while another may not.
Sure, you can adjust each segment individually, but then you run into the first problem. Now you have to figure out what part of the map corresponds to the turn-by-turn direction that is a toll road (even just hovering over the turn-by-turn directions is an active action you have to take)*, try a different route, see if it's still marked as a toll, try a different route, see if it's still marked as a toll, etc.
* Actually counting this against Google's approach isn't quite fair; in both Bing and Mapquest, the route line they draw on the map covers over the toll indications. So if you want to try other routes to avoid tolls, you have to do the same thing.
As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, you can do it with Ovi maps on Nokias. I have maps for a few states loaded.
It's not perfect, at least with the version of Ovi maps I have on my phone -- it still tries to connect to a network so you have to keep telling it no, and it doesn't seem like you can search for locations or ask for directions offline. But you [i]can[/i] look around the map, and it can follow your current location using GPS.
I can't speak to how it is when being used as a car GPS replacement; I'm too cheap for a data plan and so I plan my routes in advance and then execute them. I also keep an actual atlas in my car and can (and like to, obviously:-)) read maps.
When used like that, it's competent. The directions it comes up with are usually reasonable, though I think it should do a better job at routing around city centers. (Like my continual Chicago example: from Rockford to South Bend it will send you on I-90 all the way, but in my experience it's far better to go around via 290 and 294.)
It's just not as good as some of the other sites for just looking around the map at a large scale. Some of that is missing features, some of that is personal preference in terms of aesthetics, and some of that is a mixture of both. Printed atlases tend to be even better except for the total lack of zoomability.
I do look, though I'll admit that it usually doesn't pan out in terms of being worth it.
For instance, taking the Chicago case, if you're traveling west-to-east from Rockford (or, as is probably clear from the urls I linked, Madison) to points East, if I-88 wasn't a toll road it'd probably be worth it to use that route. It's a bit longer, but you'd save several dollars on tolls and it's a bit better driving than I-90 is.
Or once I asked for advice on how late it's reasonable to hit Chicago before afternoon rush hour, and someone suggested avoiding it completely if your destination is in the right place. From my experimentation the "right place" isn't a very big area, but there are places where mapping software will send you through Chicago and across on the IL, IN, OH, and PA turnpikes when you can take an entirely different route and avoid all of those. Richmond is an example: Rockford to Richmond is 13:02 by Bing's estimate (just what I happened to have left up from before) via the route I just mentioned, or 13:47 if you take 39 all the way south to Bloomington then 74 to Indianapolis etc., taking a far more southery route. For that extra 45 minutes (or really, probably less), you avoid something like $25 or $30 in tolls.
OK, fair point, and looking around the fact that both Bing and Mapquest seem to lack official legends anywhere from what I can tell is a significant strike against (though not more than Google, which also apparently lacks one).
However, I can tell you with high confidence that in those two maps the green roads are toll roads. They correspond both in Chicago and in other areas I'm somewhat familiar with to what I know to be true regarding what's a toll road, Furthermore, green for "toll road" is a pretty standard notation for road atlases. It never even occurred to me to look for a legend.
I'm not talking about the turn-by-turn directions, I'm talking about the maps. Quick, where are the toll roads? How 'bout now? Or now?
I guess if you just enter in a start and end into Google maps and blindly follow whatever comes out it works fine, but if you want to scan around for alternate routes (hint: Google doesn't pick the best route for going through Chicago from east-to-west or vice versa) or just want to look around at maps, that's not good enough.
I just wish that Google would learn some lessons about 2D cartography. Like how to mark toll roads and stuff.
It's kind of frustrating because Google maps is really good at local stuff (zoom in to see individual business names and stuff, and of course street view) but other services are a lot better once you're looking at a range beyond a few blocks.
The Fox article was spot on, at least when I saw it, in comparison to MSNBC's piece-of-shit excuse for an article.
I'd link it but I don't want to give them the traffic. (The title was "Was Flame virus written by cyberwarriors or gamers?" if that gives you any idea.)
there's a similar issue actually with sheet music--most of the good sheet music for those same pieces is under some degree of copyright control. i wonder if anyone's looking at doing the same thing there? you could transcribe whole swaths of the canon to MusicXML or ABC and release them under CC-SA or GFDL pretty cheaply, i'd think.
There is a very large collection of scans of existing pieces at the International Music Score Library Project. The Mutopia Project has a relatively small collection of scores, but theirs are typeset using Lilypond with source freely available.
Yet many of the more trained musicians know their part, and can play it to a proper tempo regardless of surrounding.
It's not just a matter of tempo; that's easy to fix (though I really do think it'd be hopeless without either a standardized click track or, later on, using recordings from previous iterations). Similar with raw dynamics; you can change the volume of a recording pretty well.
What I'm... concerned?... about is stuff like phrasing, articulations ("how staccatto is this stacatto?"), breaths/bowings, swells, string fingerings, etc. There's a [i]lot[/i] of interpretation possible even within the confines of a written score, especially in some kinds of classical music. (Broadly speaking, the older a work is the less spelled out is the score. Nowadays you'll see specific tempo markings ("quarter note = 90"), but in Beethoven's time you'd just see "moderato" or whatever.)
I feel like even if you took the score and wrote pretty detailed instructions (e.g. notated most of the bowings explicitly) throughout, gave out a click track, etc. but didn't go through the iteration process I mentioned before, the result you'd get would be technically good but musically mediocre.
I've wondered about this, and I don't know. My guess is that it would give a result that's better than mediocre orchestras but not as good as a top tier orchestra, but that's just a guess.
The problem is that if you record instrument-by-instrument you lose a lot of feedback in terms of how to balance different volumes and sounds and articulations and stuff like that. And the problem would become even worse if you just passed out sheet music and a click track and said "go record this" because then you're losing the overall interpretation of the conductor and section leaders as well.
Now on the other hand, there are definitely commercial recordings that aren't done all together; I've got a recording of the 1812 overture with some added chorus parts where the orchestra, cannons, and chorus (maybe even two choruses) were all recorded separately. But that's still far from recording each instrument, and still has someone with an overall vision.
I suspect to get really good results from something like that you'd have to have a strongly iterative process: everyone records revision 1, some de facto leader or small group of leaders distribute those recordings with comments and additional instructions, everyone records revision 2, etc. and repeat for a few more cycles.
Roughly speaking, there are three levels of "greenness", for lack of a better word. "Off the grid" means you're totally self-sufficient; probably solar during the day stored to batteries for night, combined with ultra-efficient stuff. "Net zero" means you self-generate a surplus of power sometimes and a deficit others, selling your excess to the power company and buying your need. Being "fully renewable", like what Apple announced, "just" means you're buying all renewable energy. If you read the article you linked to, you'd see that Apple will only be generating 60% of its need, which means it's far from net zero.
I'm not actually sure how much the last means in practice, considering that it's not like they have dividers that say "this electron came from solar so it goes to Apple, while this electron came from coal so it can't." So really what it turns into is Apple giving the power company more money so that hopefully they'll build more renewable sources. Not to say that I don't applaud the decision, and even 60% generation is impressive, but it is indirect.
However, it does at least appear to be consistent, which is the most important thing, so its preferences could be considered a publisher's house style and just something you have to get used to.
Actually one other possibility strikes my mind, which is that the style of accidentals in that copy were actually what was used in Bach's time, and the current norm arose later (and was typically retroactively applied to earlier works). If that's true, then this effort could be an attempt to be "true to the original", so to speak.
Of course, this is complete and utter speculation, as I haven't read TFA or anything.:-)
It's funny, I was just playing around with a different music editor (Denemo) transcribing some written music. And that piece had a bunch of accidentals that were unnecessary and unbracketed. But it seemed to be somewhat arbitrary; some advisory accidentals were normal accidentals, some were in brackets, and some places I would have expected them based on other uses were missing.
There were advisory accidentals that crossed both barlines and octaves. Dunno if I saw cancels of cross-bar, cross-octave accidentals.:-)
I don't know if this was just sloppy editing or someone actually preferred it.
(Actually to be honest, I played cello in school orchestra for 9 years (basically stopping about a decade ago actually), I actually didn't know that accidentals didn't cross octaves until looking into related issues.)
I can't say I've used MuseScore (though I will check it out), but it has Lilypond export.
I'm not quite sure what that means though; whether you lose a lot in translation, or MuseScore pushes its defaults so that they're hard to remove, and such.
(I also understand that some of the other behavior is questionable too, e.g. strcat_s will replace the first character of the source string with '\0', which makes it hard to recover from an error.)
Are you talking about "Eclipse when working in Java" Eclipse, or "Eclipse when working in C++" Eclipse? Because the former is pretty awesome, but my experience with the latter (admittedly several years out of date) is that it pretty much sucks.
I wouldn't be surprised if some future version of Windows doesn't even allow you to install programs that don't come from some Windows 8 version of the iTunes app store.
I suppose it's theoretically possible that I'll have to bite my tongue later, but IMO you're crazy if you actually think that. Basically MS would have to ignore the largest reason that Windows is where it is, which is backwards compatibility. Yes, there was a lot of monopolistic crap in there too, but that wouldn't have helped if they were making it hard for people to run their old software. But the degree that MS bends over backwards to ensure that old software continues to run goes to ridiculous lengths.
Despite what may be prevailing/. wisdom, MS really has been a developer-friendly company. Their main problem is changing "favored technology" like pants -- one day it's straight Win32, then MFC, then WinForms, then XAML, then Metro, and who knows what buzzwords I've missed. But the old technologies continue to be supported; hell, you can run DOS programs on Windows 7 if you've got the 32-bit version. (I think, I can't verify.) They're happy as long as people are developing on Windows.
If your prediction comes true, it'll be the death knell for Windows.
Actually crazily enough I worked for a (relatively small) company that did mixed platform development, and while there were some copies of the full VS floating around, I'm almost positive most of the day-to-day Windows development happened with the express editions. (Caveat: the build system was SCons, using the MSVC compiler.)
Or maybe that was just my day-to-day dev since I was an intern.:-)
Point being, the express editions really were a surprisingly capable tool on their own.
I haven't seen anyone use an IDE more efficiently than what I can do with Emacs and the command-line.
I use emacs for 99% of my stuff, and I have to say, while it's a great editor, I wish I had IDE-level code browsing abilities (and to a lesser extent, intellisense-style stuff). I'd kill someone for good "go to definition" support. Ctags-style stuff is a shitty substitute, at least on our code base, and I've never really been able to get the fancier stuff to work well. VS isn't perfect there either, but it's still a lot better...
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The TL;DR version of this: "I can read a legend." :-)
And I'm not saying you have to go quite as dense as what you would get with a physical map -- being interactive does buy you a lot. I just thing Google Maps swings way way too far the other direction. For instance, in my mind Bing Maps strikes a significantly better balance between being not to cluttered and still having increased information density -- and I'd like to see even that pushed a little more.
As for styling them differently, using a new color seems confusing without also adding a legend.
I guess what I really want you guys to do is add a legend. :-)
A different road color could mean the highway is more/less prominent or (in some areas) a seasonal route.
Well, I also think these should be better indicated. For instance, read the first part of my post here, comparing the view of Google Maps to Bing.
Let's see if I can explain my main gripes with Google Maps. This is long, so if you actually read it I thank you (and it's pretty cool that you responded in the first place, BTW... maybe you can convince people to add an "informative map" view :-)). And don't take it too personally; I whine about software a lot, and Google Maps is kinda software. :-)
Viewed on my 1080p 22" monitor, the scale of this map appears at roughly the same real size as it does in my Rand McNally road atlas. Google's is actually about 60% bigger, which just adds strength to my arguments. (The distance from Platteville to the Madison Capitol building is 11.3mm on screen and 7.2mm on paper.) On the Google map, I can discern two kinds of roads: limited access highways and other highways. In the atlas, that cross section has limited access highways, other multilane highways, principle highways, other through highways, and other roads (reading off their key). In other areas of the country toll roads would also be visible, and presumably in others there would also be unpaved roads. (It's in the legend but I don't know where it ever appears.) On Google's map, there are 12 unique route markers visible. On Rand McNally's, I picked a somewhat random 1 inch by 1 inch square; it had 8. (The square was around House on the Rock and Talesin, two things that aren't on Google's map.)
If we zoom in one notch, a bunch of additional roads appear. (In fairness, there are now far more roads than appear on the Rand McNally atlas.) But there's no distinction between them. On that map, County Road H ("other road (conditions vary -- local inquiry suggested)" in the atlas legend) appears to me exactly the same as US-18 east of Dodgeville ("principle highway"), except that the latter has a route designator at that zoom level. You have to zoom in again before the route designators for the county highways (or WI-23 going north from Dodgeville ("other through highway")) appear -- two levels in from "60% larger than printed atlas".
Now let's compare to Bing. (I don't actually know how this'll go; we'll see.) At nearly the same zoom level as the first Google map we looked at (11.5mm from Platteville to central Madison, probably within my measurement error from Google's 11.3), Bing is missing several roads that appear on Google's. On the other hand, it has many more town names (like Monticello and New Glarus). If we zoom in once, they seem to have about the same roads on them, though the're a little hard to see on Bing's map and I actually had to zoom in again to actually establish that they are, in fact, roads. But we do see that WI-23 north of Dodgeville is decidedly indicated as a more major road than a lot of the county roads (the whisker-thin lines) and yet less than US-18 and US-151. Interestingly, US-18 west of Dodgeville is marked as a noticably more major road than it appears in either Google Map
So what if one part of the route has a reasonable way to avoid tolls and another one doesn't?
Not dozens of road types, hundreds of various symbols etc that you see in some road maps
And this is my problem with it; you say "the philosophy is simplicity and clarity", I say "the philosophy is have far less information" and then dispute the "clarity" part.
Here's another example; I'll just compare to Bing maps because I like them the best (in no small part because they seem to be the closest to printed maps). Compare this to this. (Durrr, I can link the maps directly, I don't need to take a screenshot and upload them.)
On Bing's map, the distinction between the main routes through the area (US 65 and US 412) and others is very clear. It's there in Google's, but it's far far less pronounced. Furthermore, Bing makes a distinction between AR-7 (going south from Harrison) and US-62 (upper-left corner, where US-412 turns south), versus the other roads that are shown on the map, like AR-43 and AR-397. That distinction isn't visible on Google's at all.
Without a legend you don't know what kind of roads those are, but from the information there you can at least get a good sense of what are likely to be major routes.
And that also provides a good illustration of my counter argument to your "clarity" statement. To me, the distinctions made on the Bing map actually make it much easier to read... the Google version comparatively just looks like a big jumble of roads.
When you do actually want to see a route, you are told which roads are toll roads, and you can have option to adjust and avoid them.
But... it's not just that! If you want to say "are there decent toll-free routes" you have to try a bunch of things. With an actually good road map, you just look. Furthermore, it's not just a matter of "toll roads are A-OK!" and "avoid toll roads"; one part may have an easily-avoidable toll while another may not.
Sure, you can adjust each segment individually, but then you run into the first problem. Now you have to figure out what part of the map corresponds to the turn-by-turn direction that is a toll road (even just hovering over the turn-by-turn directions is an active action you have to take)*, try a different route, see if it's still marked as a toll, try a different route, see if it's still marked as a toll, etc.
* Actually counting this against Google's approach isn't quite fair; in both Bing and Mapquest, the route line they draw on the map covers over the toll indications. So if you want to try other routes to avoid tolls, you have to do the same thing.
>> But you [i]can[/i] look around the map
Hah, too much time at other forums I guess.
As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, you can do it with Ovi maps on Nokias. I have maps for a few states loaded.
It's not perfect, at least with the version of Ovi maps I have on my phone -- it still tries to connect to a network so you have to keep telling it no, and it doesn't seem like you can search for locations or ask for directions offline. But you [i]can[/i] look around the map, and it can follow your current location using GPS.
I can't speak to how it is when being used as a car GPS replacement; I'm too cheap for a data plan and so I plan my routes in advance and then execute them. I also keep an actual atlas in my car and can (and like to, obviously :-)) read maps.
When used like that, it's competent. The directions it comes up with are usually reasonable, though I think it should do a better job at routing around city centers. (Like my continual Chicago example: from Rockford to South Bend it will send you on I-90 all the way, but in my experience it's far better to go around via 290 and 294.)
It's just not as good as some of the other sites for just looking around the map at a large scale. Some of that is missing features, some of that is personal preference in terms of aesthetics, and some of that is a mixture of both. Printed atlases tend to be even better except for the total lack of zoomability.
I do look, though I'll admit that it usually doesn't pan out in terms of being worth it.
For instance, taking the Chicago case, if you're traveling west-to-east from Rockford (or, as is probably clear from the urls I linked, Madison) to points East, if I-88 wasn't a toll road it'd probably be worth it to use that route. It's a bit longer, but you'd save several dollars on tolls and it's a bit better driving than I-90 is.
Or once I asked for advice on how late it's reasonable to hit Chicago before afternoon rush hour, and someone suggested avoiding it completely if your destination is in the right place. From my experimentation the "right place" isn't a very big area, but there are places where mapping software will send you through Chicago and across on the IL, IN, OH, and PA turnpikes when you can take an entirely different route and avoid all of those. Richmond is an example: Rockford to Richmond is 13:02 by Bing's estimate (just what I happened to have left up from before) via the route I just mentioned, or 13:47 if you take 39 all the way south to Bloomington then 74 to Indianapolis etc., taking a far more southery route. For that extra 45 minutes (or really, probably less), you avoid something like $25 or $30 in tolls.
OK, fair point, and looking around the fact that both Bing and Mapquest seem to lack official legends anywhere from what I can tell is a significant strike against (though not more than Google, which also apparently lacks one).
However, I can tell you with high confidence that in those two maps the green roads are toll roads. They correspond both in Chicago and in other areas I'm somewhat familiar with to what I know to be true regarding what's a toll road, Furthermore, green for "toll road" is a pretty standard notation for road atlases. It never even occurred to me to look for a legend.
I'm not talking about the turn-by-turn directions, I'm talking about the maps. Quick, where are the toll roads? How 'bout now? Or now?
I guess if you just enter in a start and end into Google maps and blindly follow whatever comes out it works fine, but if you want to scan around for alternate routes (hint: Google doesn't pick the best route for going through Chicago from east-to-west or vice versa) or just want to look around at maps, that's not good enough.
I just wish that Google would learn some lessons about 2D cartography. Like how to mark toll roads and stuff.
It's kind of frustrating because Google maps is really good at local stuff (zoom in to see individual business names and stuff, and of course street view) but other services are a lot better once you're looking at a range beyond a few blocks.
The Fox article was spot on, at least when I saw it, in comparison to MSNBC's piece-of-shit excuse for an article.
I'd link it but I don't want to give them the traffic. (The title was "Was Flame virus written by cyberwarriors or gamers?" if that gives you any idea.)
there's a similar issue actually with sheet music--most of the good sheet music for those same pieces is under some degree of copyright control. i wonder if anyone's looking at doing the same thing there? you could transcribe whole swaths of the canon to MusicXML or ABC and release them under CC-SA or GFDL pretty cheaply, i'd think.
There is a very large collection of scans of existing pieces at the International Music Score Library Project. The Mutopia Project has a relatively small collection of scores, but theirs are typeset using Lilypond with source freely available.
Yet many of the more trained musicians know their part, and can play it to a proper tempo regardless of surrounding.
It's not just a matter of tempo; that's easy to fix (though I really do think it'd be hopeless without either a standardized click track or, later on, using recordings from previous iterations). Similar with raw dynamics; you can change the volume of a recording pretty well.
What I'm... concerned?... about is stuff like phrasing, articulations ("how staccatto is this stacatto?"), breaths/bowings, swells, string fingerings, etc. There's a [i]lot[/i] of interpretation possible even within the confines of a written score, especially in some kinds of classical music. (Broadly speaking, the older a work is the less spelled out is the score. Nowadays you'll see specific tempo markings ("quarter note = 90"), but in Beethoven's time you'd just see "moderato" or whatever.)
I feel like even if you took the score and wrote pretty detailed instructions (e.g. notated most of the bowings explicitly) throughout, gave out a click track, etc. but didn't go through the iteration process I mentioned before, the result you'd get would be technically good but musically mediocre.
But like I said, this is just speculation.
I've wondered about this, and I don't know. My guess is that it would give a result that's better than mediocre orchestras but not as good as a top tier orchestra, but that's just a guess.
The problem is that if you record instrument-by-instrument you lose a lot of feedback in terms of how to balance different volumes and sounds and articulations and stuff like that. And the problem would become even worse if you just passed out sheet music and a click track and said "go record this" because then you're losing the overall interpretation of the conductor and section leaders as well.
Now on the other hand, there are definitely commercial recordings that aren't done all together; I've got a recording of the 1812 overture with some added chorus parts where the orchestra, cannons, and chorus (maybe even two choruses) were all recorded separately. But that's still far from recording each instrument, and still has someone with an overall vision.
I suspect to get really good results from something like that you'd have to have a strongly iterative process: everyone records revision 1, some de facto leader or small group of leaders distribute those recordings with comments and additional instructions, everyone records revision 2, etc. and repeat for a few more cycles.
No, they didn't.
Roughly speaking, there are three levels of "greenness", for lack of a better word. "Off the grid" means you're totally self-sufficient; probably solar during the day stored to batteries for night, combined with ultra-efficient stuff. "Net zero" means you self-generate a surplus of power sometimes and a deficit others, selling your excess to the power company and buying your need. Being "fully renewable", like what Apple announced, "just" means you're buying all renewable energy. If you read the article you linked to, you'd see that Apple will only be generating 60% of its need, which means it's far from net zero.
I'm not actually sure how much the last means in practice, considering that it's not like they have dividers that say "this electron came from solar so it goes to Apple, while this electron came from coal so it can't." So really what it turns into is Apple giving the power company more money so that hopefully they'll build more renewable sources. Not to say that I don't applaud the decision, and even 60% generation is impressive, but it is indirect.
However, it does at least appear to be consistent, which is the most important thing, so its preferences could be considered a publisher's house style and just something you have to get used to.
Actually one other possibility strikes my mind, which is that the style of accidentals in that copy were actually what was used in Bach's time, and the current norm arose later (and was typically retroactively applied to earlier works). If that's true, then this effort could be an attempt to be "true to the original", so to speak.
Of course, this is complete and utter speculation, as I haven't read TFA or anything. :-)
It's funny, I was just playing around with a different music editor (Denemo) transcribing some written music. And that piece had a bunch of accidentals that were unnecessary and unbracketed. But it seemed to be somewhat arbitrary; some advisory accidentals were normal accidentals, some were in brackets, and some places I would have expected them based on other uses were missing.
There were advisory accidentals that crossed both barlines and octaves. Dunno if I saw cancels of cross-bar, cross-octave accidentals. :-)
I don't know if this was just sloppy editing or someone actually preferred it.
(Actually to be honest, I played cello in school orchestra for 9 years (basically stopping about a decade ago actually), I actually didn't know that accidentals didn't cross octaves until looking into related issues.)
I can't say I've used MuseScore (though I will check it out), but it has Lilypond export.
I'm not quite sure what that means though; whether you lose a lot in translation, or MuseScore pushes its defaults so that they're hard to remove, and such.
(I also understand that some of the other behavior is questionable too, e.g. strcat_s will replace the first character of the source string with '\0', which makes it hard to recover from an error.)
Or, those "security enhanced" replacements for most ANSI C functions that are actually less secure than originals (fopen_s(), etc).
OK, I understand the portability objections to these functions... but saying they're "less secure?" You're gonna have to explain that one.
Are you talking about "Eclipse when working in Java" Eclipse, or "Eclipse when working in C++" Eclipse? Because the former is pretty awesome, but my experience with the latter (admittedly several years out of date) is that it pretty much sucks.
I wouldn't be surprised if some future version of Windows doesn't even allow you to install programs that don't come from some Windows 8 version of the iTunes app store.
I suppose it's theoretically possible that I'll have to bite my tongue later, but IMO you're crazy if you actually think that. Basically MS would have to ignore the largest reason that Windows is where it is, which is backwards compatibility. Yes, there was a lot of monopolistic crap in there too, but that wouldn't have helped if they were making it hard for people to run their old software. But the degree that MS bends over backwards to ensure that old software continues to run goes to ridiculous lengths.
Despite what may be prevailing /. wisdom, MS really has been a developer-friendly company. Their main problem is changing "favored technology" like pants -- one day it's straight Win32, then MFC, then WinForms, then XAML, then Metro, and who knows what buzzwords I've missed. But the old technologies continue to be supported; hell, you can run DOS programs on Windows 7 if you've got the 32-bit version. (I think, I can't verify.) They're happy as long as people are developing on Windows.
If your prediction comes true, it'll be the death knell for Windows.
Actually crazily enough I worked for a (relatively small) company that did mixed platform development, and while there were some copies of the full VS floating around, I'm almost positive most of the day-to-day Windows development happened with the express editions. (Caveat: the build system was SCons, using the MSVC compiler.)
Or maybe that was just my day-to-day dev since I was an intern. :-)
Point being, the express editions really were a surprisingly capable tool on their own.
I haven't seen anyone use an IDE more efficiently than what I can do with Emacs and the command-line.
I use emacs for 99% of my stuff, and I have to say, while it's a great editor, I wish I had IDE-level code browsing abilities (and to a lesser extent, intellisense-style stuff). I'd kill someone for good "go to definition" support. Ctags-style stuff is a shitty substitute, at least on our code base, and I've never really been able to get the fancier stuff to work well. VS isn't perfect there either, but it's still a lot better...