Yes, orchestration is indeed a problem that EMI hasn't seemed able to crack. (One thing I like about Cope is that he's the first to admit the weaknesses and problems with EMI.)
I recall seeing a Cope video where "The Beatles" was an option in EMI... He's never posted any EMI works by a pop group that I know of. I suspect that the "sound" of a particular group depends more on the vocal quality of the lead singer than anything else.
I should explain EMI is a "recomposer" - you feed it source material that it analyzes (harmonic function, melodic line, etc.) and then stores into a database.
One thing the pattern matcher looks for are motifs and cliches that a composer tends to employ across works. These are the musical chunks that help us recognize works as belonging to one particular composer or another.
Interestingly, Cope discovered that most of these "fingerprints" occured in the cadences (at the finish of the musical phrase) instead of as favorite melodic patterns or harmonies (although these certainly exist, and EMI uses them as well).
EMI composes a "new" work by creating "generic" music (often based on the pattern of a composer's work) and overlays it with functional bits from its database. The result is an often convincing (if bland) work in the style of a composer.
Unfortunately, in order to make music recombine well, some simplification of the input work is done. Cope acknowledge that how well this "simplification" is done - as well as how well chosen the works are for commonality - heavily influences the end result.
Still, I think it's interesting work. The music that it (re)composes is certainly better job at creating passable music in a particular composer's style than any other program I've looked at - including Band in a Box.
As the market changes, the system reflects this by finding new patterns in the hit clusters and applying these to the process.
So let me get this straight: if a song sounds like a current hit song, it may well be a hit song?
Any this is useful how?
They say they match parameters such as:
Melody
Harmony
Chord progression
Brilliance
Fullness of sound
Beat
Tempo
Rhythm
Octave
Pitch
This isn't "analysis", it's gross categorization (i.e.:"uptempo pop song in the Michael Bolton vocal style"). It's entirely subjective to the listener - what does "fullness of sound" mean, anyway?
Even then, they add this huge disclaimer:
BUT there is a major caveat: There are three factors to making a hit song:
1. The song must be good from an A&R perspective. That is it must sound like a hit song to human ears.
2. It must have optimal mathematical patterns. (that's where this service comes in).
3. It must be promoted well and with an appropriate artist.
Feh. Nothing to see here. If you're interested in real algorithmic analysis, check out David Cope.
In addition to standard RGB (red, green and blue information), you can include a fourth chunk of information: the transparency of a part of an image. This is referred to as the alpha, and together the tuple is referred to as RGBA.
In this scheme, you can specify to what degree a particular pixel is transparent, from 100% (entirely invisible) to 0% (entirely visible).
So alpha channel blending (or more simply, alpha blending) refers to the ability to combine two images in a way that includes transparency. From a user's standpoint, this means you can have windows that can be partially transparent, so you can partially see through them - a cool, but slightly disorienting effect. This is how it's currently done in Apple's OS X, and will be in the next version of Windows.
A matrix transformation is used to represent coordinate transformation. For example, rotations, translations (i.e.shifted along the X, Y or Z axis), or scaling (i.e.resized). Having this available to X11 means that these operations can be performed rapidly.
Of course, it helps if the graphics are in a format that allows these operation in the first place - that is, vector graphics (like Display PostScript, which Apple's OS X uses) instead of the traditional bitmaps.
In a nutshell, bitmaps just specify the dots to display on the screen. You can resize them, but the result is you get an image made of big, chunky dots. With vector graphics, you specify the image as a set of points that the computer connects in a dot-to-dot manner. Since th computer draws smooth lines between the dots no matter how far apart they are, vector graphics can be resized and scaled without artifacts (i.e.weird side effects).
I, for one, welcome the spinning, scalable and alpha-blended X11 overlords.
Actually, XAML is just extending ASP.NET out to the desktop.
They both have the GUI defined by an *ML grammar, and can either have the code either embedded in the XML, or put into a codebehind page. And they both rely on.NET to compile them - no interpreting allowed.
The only thing really new is the partial keyword, so you can spread your class definition through several source files... Bleah.
The XML primarily allows you to specify the layout of widgets on your form (whatever the render happens to be: Windows.Forms or Areo's Canvas class). Sure, it's nice to be able to define this in a standard format, but I'm having trouble figuring out what's the big deal?
The irony is that HTML was actually designed too seperate the specifics of the look and feel from the document. Instead of having to worry about the font face, and how emphasis was rendered, you'd let the browser worry about it.
Now, XML is being used to specify the look and feel down to the last pixel. By default, ASP.NET generates HTML that is located by absolute position, and text is specified with a particular font in a particular size...
If you really need a raytracer, Yafray is nicely integrated with Yable, so you can use a raytracer with Blender.
RenderMan didn't have a raytracer until fairly recently. For movies such as A Bug's Life where a raytracer really was needed, Pixar ended up using Larry Gritz' BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Tools), a RenderMan compliant raytracer.
Ironically enough, Pixar ended up suing ExLuna for infringment of intellectual property, which ended up in ExLuna's products (including BMRT) being pulled from the market.
So how did Pixar get by all those years without a raytracer? Well, there are a lot of shader tricks that can be done, as well as clever use of lighting. Radiosity, reflections... all these effects can be simulated.
All this is to say that the real limit of tools isn't so much the tools themselves, but what people do with the tools.
I don't know how light it is, but you might consider looking at the ROS Explorer. It was written as a replacement for the NT Explorer, and runs under XP. Its current goal in life is to run as the ReactOS (i.e. NT clone) desktop, although currently the ReactOS doesn't currently implement enough functionality to run it.
It works just fine under XP as a shell. If you want to test it without replacing your current shell, just launch it from the command line with the -desktop option.
Well, I am an Americanm and I keep seeing these late night ads for salads at places like McDonalds and Wendy's.
It's not that people don't care about what they eat - it's just tremendously difficult to get processed food that isn't stuffed with additional fat and calories. This isn't just "fast food' - just about anything that you pick up off a grocery shelf has a horrifically high level of fat and calories. So even eating this crap in moderation is bad.
Pretty much the only way to avoid this problem is to make food from scratch, but there's another trend working against you: Americans are also working longer hours, and getting less and less leisure time. Less time for making good food, exercising, sleeping enough...
One could claim that you should "just use common sense", but what does that mean? Does eating "naturally" mean recreating a "caveman" diet? And if so, did our proto-ancestors really eat fruits and berries (seasonal, and often scarce) or meat? What if it turns out we're designed to eat grubs?
I'm voting with Warren Zevon and enjoying those sandwiches. Life is a delicate balance between aging and cancer. And in the end, you're dead.
Are kids people? By current law, yes, they are considered people.
No, law doesn't consider them people in the sense of citizens with full rights. They are legally minors.
That's why there can be curfew laws, juvenile court, and parents can often be held liable for actions of children. The rights of minors is quite curtailed.
It's interesting that you don't seem to notice the phrase which that amendment starts with: "A well regulated militia", not "in order for kids to play with their parent's guns".
Actually, race is often a factor. Something about contributing to the diversity of the campus, thus increasing the quality of the experience for all involved.
The University of Michigan (or some such college - I'm too lazy to check out these little details) recently got into trouble because of how they used race as a factor. Basically, they had assigned fixed score value to various things, so being of a particular ethnic pursuasion got you so many points.
It was the fixed number of points that got them into trouble. The courts decided that factors such as race could in fact be used, but only if the process was flexible. What that meant exactly posed an interesting challenge. They basically looked at what everyone else who wasn't getting sued was doing, and did an amalgamation of that.
To make a feeble attempt to tie this back to the topic, is raises an interesting question: is it better to have a paper scored by a process that is inflexible but predictable (ie: a program) or one that is flexible, but unpredictable (ie: a teacher).
There's also Mono, the Open Source implementation of Microsoft's.NET framework.
The original idea was to implement the Windows.Forms library with some native toolkit. But since it's so dependant on the Microsoft windows model, it turned out they would pretty much have to write it from scratch - or use Wine.
There's also React OS, an Open Source implementation of Windows NT. They've spent most of their effort over the last couple years working on the core functionality. Now that most of the core is working, they can use Wine libraries as the basis of much of the higher level functionality, instead of writing it from scratch.
Hrm... the ReactOS site seems to be offline at the moment. From the Google cache of the announcement of stuff due at the end of Augusy:
Amongst other features and fixes, this release will include a greatly improved win32k.sys (better, windowing, keyboard support, more routines completed overall), the beginning of an explorer.exe, more controls ported from WINE for user32 (menus, messageboxes and dialogs), greatly improved performance for the standard VGA driver and further work on the NDIS driver.
More options are better. An Open Source version of NT is certainly a Good Thing(tm).
Why should I pay money to support their obsolete business model? Adapt or die.
Selling software isn't an obsolete business model by any means. We just happen to be at a point where a monopoly has managed to continue to charge an obscene amount of money for what should basically be a commodity item.
You sound like the people who thought that the Internet presented a "whole new paradigm" and that the old business models were obsolete. Turns out they were wrong, and that eventually the dotcom boom turned into a speculative bubble.
The core of what's happening with Open Source is a response to classic market pressures. Office suite software should be dirt cheap by now, not priced at an obscene $300. Heck, it's not just Microsoft - I saw WordPerfect Office at my local Fry's for $300. What are those people smoking?
The response from the market has been to say Screw that - I'd rather write something that people can use for free than keep paying these obscene prices. (In the case of OpenOffice, Sun was also obsessed with finding a way to do some damage to Microsoft.)
The fact that you use software shows that it has some value. Money represents a convenient way of measuring that value. Many of use are willing to pay full price for a new Linux distro. Some are not, and purchase a cheap CD from a second hand retailer. Others are really really cheap and download it for free on their DSL connection. (The fact that they paid $50 a month for a DSL connection shows that the software has value, even though they are too cheap to pay directly).
If the market were running correctly, much of this commercial software would be far cheaper than it is. It wouldn't be worth the time it takes to write an Office suite. Heck, much of this software should probably already be commodity items, sold at no charge.
Open Source software won't eliminate commercial software. But it will make it painful for software companies that try to screw consumers by overpricing their products.
Yes, Blender had tooltips on buttons on all platforms.
Blender is an OpenGL application, and draws it's own widgets and windows, so it has the same look and feel on all platforms.
Blender has implemented a lot of improvements to the interface from the earlier releases. But (as others have pointed out) 3D animation is hard. Many operations are non-trivial, and require a number of steps. A more clear UI would be helpful, but not under these circumstances.
There are also a lot of 'hidden' functions that people don't know about. For example, there are constant requests for Blender to have more Wings3D sort of modelling features. Blender already supports things like face select and extrude along normal but finding out about them is a different matter. (I doubt I can remember what key combination brings up extrude along normal, and I haven't the foggiest idea how to go about finding it from within Blender.)
Anyhoo, I think what Blender needs is good integrated documentation. The Blender team seems hellbent on keeping the download as small as possible, and don't want to include anything that's not necessary with the core download.
Still, integrated help would solve a number of problems:
Newbies could discover things like U for Undo.
Intermediate users could find out the order of buttons to press to get radiosity to work.
Longtime users would never use it, but they'd never see it, either.
If you read any of the numerous tutorials on Blender, you can get the hang of the UI in less than a half hour.
That depends on what you mean by "get the hang of the UI". Sure, you can figure out that buttons can be pushed and that everything in Blender looks like a button. At least form could fit the function, y'know?
The main problem is that the UI doesn't give you any clue how to perform tasks. For example, might know, for example, that you need to add bones to your mesh. But how to do that?
I know that it can be done, but looking through the menus and tabs, I can't see hide nor hare of anything like a Add Bones option. Once the bones are added, how are they supposed to be parented to the mesh? Again, the UI doesn't give any clue.
Just because you (or any other number of users) can figure out how to do great things in Blender - and Blender is an amazingly powerful program - doesn't mean that it's got a good UI. I could just as easily point to the Persistance of Vision Raytracer and claim that it's got a great user interface, because lots of people can use it and produce great work with it.
It's great that you can memorize a zillion different keystrokes, but I can't. That means I can't use Blender without an Internet connection, so I can download the outdated manual, or search for an outdated tutorial, or head over to the friendly folk on #blenderchat for some help.
Most people that complain about Blender and it's interface haven't read any of the documentation on it and spent 30 minutes trying to figure it out.
Well, the same goes for most people who use any software. But one of the points of a UI is to expose functionality of the product. And that's something that Blender does terribly, even for someone like me who's been struggling with the UI for a couple years.
There are other Free software programs that support animation, such as Art of Illusion and Anim8or. There are up and coming contenders, such as JPatch and Wings3D that don't yet support animation, but promise to in the near future. As powerful as Blender is, I'm hanging my hopes one one of these less powerful, but more user friendly applications.
(In fairness should note that Ton has recently set up a forum for the improvement of Blender, and one of the main focuses on Blender 2.0 will be an improved user interface.)
...the complexity is too great for an untrained ear to really understand.
The same can be said of any sort of music.
No, sorry. At the time, classical music had just as many hacks cranking out crappy music in the classical style. Time has managed to weed out a great deal of the mediocre stuff, but you still have tons of bland, uninteresting stuff.
Then, like today, true genius was ignored, and mediocrity was rewarded. The system was a bit different - there was a patronage of the rich, rather than a control by a media monpoly - but it still sucked to be a musician.
Consider for example J. S. Bach. He was considered a provincial composer, and admired by a select few - Mozart only became familiar with his work - and fairly late in his career - because of commissions from a patron who happend to be a J. S. Bach devotee.
At it's heart, the "classical" style is built around a dance form with various extensions - repetitions, delays, extensions, elaborations. There's a huge amount of classical music that does exactly that, with such a mind-numbingly lack of ideas that even the Beastie Boys sound refreshing in contrast. At least jazz redirects the delayed cadence in interesting directions.
As for the nature vs. nurture argument, I'll certainly believe that there are people with massive amounts of inborn talent.
But I'll take my cue from J. S. Bach, and believe that with or without talent, working your ass off is always a good plan. Even a poor student can become better, and many great composers revisited Fux's Gradus Ad Parnassus (a classic textbook on counterpoint) with great effect.
I believe you are referring to David Cope's program EMI - "Experiments in Musical Intelligence."
You can find examples of Cope/EMI compositions in MIDI and PDF format here.
Cope has written extensively about EMI in Computers and Musical Style and Experiments in Musical Intelligence. In the second volume, he includes a "mini" version of EMI called Sara, which is written in LISP and will run on a Mac. You can also find the source here.
Sara works by reassembling works of a composer to form new works. Basically, Cope "distills" a composer's work by simplifying the texture, changing the key, and doing other things that make it more amenable to recomposition.
Then the work is fed into Sara, which analyzes each bar based on harmonic function, melodic function, and so on. These analyzed chunks are then stored in a database.
To "recompose" a work, Sara picks a composition to use as the base. It then replaces each bar in the composition with a functionally equivalent bar from the database, based on harmonic function, melodic direction, and so on. The result is a composition which follows the same general contours of the original work, but has a different melody, texture, and often changed harmony - yet still follows the same stylistic rules of the composer.
EMI is significantly more powerful than Sara. At it's core is a rules-based composition engine, which can generate proper - and perhaps a bit bland - compositions in many styles following music compositional rules. For example, it can even generate a 'proper' four part fugue. EMI's pattern matcher is more sophisticated than Sara's, and EMI is much more subtle in how it weaves a composer's work into it's own. It's even difficult for Cope to tell where the material comes from.
EMI was written primarily to help Cope through a writer's block, and in The Algorithmic Composer he details Alice (ALgorithmically Integrated Composing Environment), yet another incarnation of EMI, which functions as a composer's assistance (included with the text).
Cope is an excellent author, and he makes much of his work understandable to people without a degree in Music Composition or Artificial Intelligence. He's is quite willing to acknowledge and discuss the shortcomings of his programs. In a field where some people consider using fractals as "composition" because the results resemble music, Cope has managed to create something that not only "resembles" music - it's fooled a lot of experts, too.
What you are basically looking for is a controllable way to make a character traverse a route.
I recall seeing a video some time back where someone was trying to make some swimmers and walkers from blocks tied together with a simulated spine. The swimmers were great - they eventually evolved into something resembling fish.
The walkers, on the other hand, took advantage of an error in the scoring system. Since they were graded on the distance that they moved, most of the walkers evolved into tall and skinny objects, and simply fell down. The taller they were, the higher the score. Oooops.
But the real issue is that you don't have control over the GA algorithm. You want to be able to specify a particular sort of walk - staggering zombie, happy double bounce. GA won't give you that.
Yes, the ruling only partly strikes down the injuction; MS still cannot ship their own version of java, but they are not forced to include Sun's version.
A number of years ago, we decided it was time to move our key entry group off the minicomputer they had been using to a PC-based application. We ended up selecting a DOS based application, and it works nicely, ThankYouVeryMuch.
The author claimed that it wasn't a QBasic application, but the error messages when it crashes tell a different story.
The QBasic integrated editor was a real joy, and it's hard to find a good, lightweight equal. Python is too big, C++ lacks the "fun" factor...
Lua with the SciTE editor comes close, if only it had builtin help.
I only stopped using QBasic after repeatedly running into the 32K memory barrier. I moved to Euphoria, a nice interpreted language. I missed the QBasic editor that I ended up writing a clone for Euphoria.
I run Mandrake, and have downloaded Ximian in the past. However, I always seem to end up in some sort of dependency hell that Red Carpet is unable to resolve.
Don't get me wrong - Red Carpet has gotten better by leaps and bounds, and when it works, it's wonderful.
Automated software can only go so far in resolving the mess of dependancies, and I finally understand why it wants to uninstall half my machine before I can download some package. But it still makes me a bit leery to go down the Ximian path without some serious functionality (or eye candy) to tempt me.
Since Mandrake 9.1 isn't supported yet (later this week, maybe), that's a bit premature anyway...
Given that (for reasons already discussed in great length) rolling back from a Ximian install is problematic, it would be nice if there were a Live CD (similar to Knoppix) to preview Ximian with.
Unfortunately, Knoppix dropped Gnome because it was just too difficult to get it working. The Morphix folk have a HeavyGUI with Gnome 2.2, so perhaps they will soon have a Ximian desktop release as well.
Has Ximian considered releasing a Live CD?
Re:Waaa waaaa "privacy concerns"
on
Walmart to Push RFID
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
We didn't really lose privacy, and it made inventorying a lot simpler.
Well, yes... If you don't count that fact that stores keep track of every item you ever purchase, then no, there was no loss of privacy at all.
So someone can query you wirelessly and find out what you bought - big f'ing deal!
I think the idea was that people could track what you purchased after you left the store, which is a bit more insidious.
Maybe you're just being sarcastic. If so, it's too subtle for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Fun toy.
I recall seeing a Cope video where "The Beatles" was an option in EMI... He's never posted any EMI works by a pop group that I know of. I suspect that the "sound" of a particular group depends more on the vocal quality of the lead singer than anything else.
I should explain EMI is a "recomposer" - you feed it source material that it analyzes (harmonic function, melodic line, etc.) and then stores into a database.
One thing the pattern matcher looks for are motifs and cliches that a composer tends to employ across works. These are the musical chunks that help us recognize works as belonging to one particular composer or another.
Interestingly, Cope discovered that most of these "fingerprints" occured in the cadences (at the finish of the musical phrase) instead of as favorite melodic patterns or harmonies (although these certainly exist, and EMI uses them as well).
EMI composes a "new" work by creating "generic" music (often based on the pattern of a composer's work) and overlays it with functional bits from its database. The result is an often convincing (if bland) work in the style of a composer.
Unfortunately, in order to make music recombine well, some simplification of the input work is done. Cope acknowledge that how well this "simplification" is done - as well as how well chosen the works are for commonality - heavily influences the end result.
Still, I think it's interesting work. The music that it (re)composes is certainly better job at creating passable music in a particular composer's style than any other program I've looked at - including Band in a Box.
So let me get this straight: if a song sounds like a current hit song, it may well be a hit song?
Any this is useful how?
They say they match parameters such as:
- Melody
- Harmony
- Chord progression
- Brilliance
- Fullness of sound
- Beat
- Tempo
- Rhythm
- Octave
- Pitch
This isn't "analysis", it's gross categorization (i.e.:"uptempo pop song in the Michael Bolton vocal style"). It's entirely subjective to the listener - what does "fullness of sound" mean, anyway?Even then, they add this huge disclaimer:
1. The song must be good from an A&R perspective. That is it must sound like a hit song to human ears.
2. It must have optimal mathematical patterns. (that's where this service comes in).
3. It must be promoted well and with an appropriate artist.
Feh. Nothing to see here. If you're interested in real algorithmic analysis, check out David Cope.
In this scheme, you can specify to what degree a particular pixel is transparent, from 100% (entirely invisible) to 0% (entirely visible).
So alpha channel blending (or more simply, alpha blending) refers to the ability to combine two images in a way that includes transparency. From a user's standpoint, this means you can have windows that can be partially transparent, so you can partially see through them - a cool, but slightly disorienting effect. This is how it's currently done in Apple's OS X, and will be in the next version of Windows.
A matrix transformation is used to represent coordinate transformation. For example, rotations, translations (i.e.shifted along the X, Y or Z axis), or scaling (i.e.resized). Having this available to X11 means that these operations can be performed rapidly.
Of course, it helps if the graphics are in a format that allows these operation in the first place - that is, vector graphics (like Display PostScript, which Apple's OS X uses) instead of the traditional bitmaps. In a nutshell, bitmaps just specify the dots to display on the screen. You can resize them, but the result is you get an image made of big, chunky dots. With vector graphics, you specify the image as a set of points that the computer connects in a dot-to-dot manner. Since th computer draws smooth lines between the dots no matter how far apart they are, vector graphics can be resized and scaled without artifacts (i.e.weird side effects).
I, for one, welcome the spinning, scalable and alpha-blended X11 overlords.
They both have the GUI defined by an *ML grammar, and can either have the code either embedded in the XML, or put into a codebehind page. And they both rely on .NET to compile them - no interpreting allowed.
The only thing really new is the partial keyword, so you can spread your class definition through several source files... Bleah.
The XML primarily allows you to specify the layout of widgets on your form (whatever the render happens to be: Windows.Forms or Areo's Canvas class). Sure, it's nice to be able to define this in a standard format, but I'm having trouble figuring out what's the big deal?
The irony is that HTML was actually designed too seperate the specifics of the look and feel from the document. Instead of having to worry about the font face, and how emphasis was rendered, you'd let the browser worry about it.
Now, XML is being used to specify the look and feel down to the last pixel. By default, ASP.NET generates HTML that is located by absolute position, and text is specified with a particular font in a particular size...
Could someone explain why this is so fabulous?
RenderMan didn't have a raytracer until fairly recently. For movies such as A Bug's Life where a raytracer really was needed, Pixar ended up using Larry Gritz' BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Tools), a RenderMan compliant raytracer.
Ironically enough, Pixar ended up suing ExLuna for infringment of intellectual property, which ended up in ExLuna's products (including BMRT) being pulled from the market.
So how did Pixar get by all those years without a raytracer? Well, there are a lot of shader tricks that can be done, as well as clever use of lighting. Radiosity, reflections... all these effects can be simulated.
All this is to say that the real limit of tools isn't so much the tools themselves, but what people do with the tools.
Oh, so when I bought my I-Opener, it wasn't a computer because the designers didn't intend me to use it that way?
It's a bit like arguing that wearing a chastity belt makes someone a virgin.
Microsoft also sells a quite popular line of mice, keyboards, and other peripherials.
Plus, there's the lucrative MSCE market...
No, Microsoft is in the money business.
It works just fine under XP as a shell. If you want to test it without replacing your current shell, just launch it from the command line with the -desktop option.
It's not that people don't care about what they eat - it's just tremendously difficult to get processed food that isn't stuffed with additional fat and calories. This isn't just "fast food' - just about anything that you pick up off a grocery shelf has a horrifically high level of fat and calories. So even eating this crap in moderation is bad.
Pretty much the only way to avoid this problem is to make food from scratch, but there's another trend working against you: Americans are also working longer hours, and getting less and less leisure time. Less time for making good food, exercising, sleeping enough...
One could claim that you should "just use common sense", but what does that mean? Does eating "naturally" mean recreating a "caveman" diet? And if so, did our proto-ancestors really eat fruits and berries (seasonal, and often scarce) or meat? What if it turns out we're designed to eat grubs?
I'm voting with Warren Zevon and enjoying those sandwiches. Life is a delicate balance between aging and cancer. And in the end, you're dead.
No, law doesn't consider them people in the sense of citizens with full rights. They are legally minors.
That's why there can be curfew laws, juvenile court, and parents can often be held liable for actions of children. The rights of minors is quite curtailed.
It's interesting that you don't seem to notice the phrase which that amendment starts with: "A well regulated militia", not "in order for kids to play with their parent's guns".
The University of Michigan (or some such college - I'm too lazy to check out these little details) recently got into trouble because of how they used race as a factor. Basically, they had assigned fixed score value to various things, so being of a particular ethnic pursuasion got you so many points.
It was the fixed number of points that got them into trouble. The courts decided that factors such as race could in fact be used, but only if the process was flexible. What that meant exactly posed an interesting challenge. They basically looked at what everyone else who wasn't getting sued was doing, and did an amalgamation of that.
To make a feeble attempt to tie this back to the topic, is raises an interesting question: is it better to have a paper scored by a process that is inflexible but predictable (ie: a program) or one that is flexible, but unpredictable (ie: a teacher).
The original idea was to implement the Windows.Forms library with some native toolkit. But since it's so dependant on the Microsoft windows model, it turned out they would pretty much have to write it from scratch - or use Wine.
There's also React OS, an Open Source implementation of Windows NT. They've spent most of their effort over the last couple years working on the core functionality. Now that most of the core is working, they can use Wine libraries as the basis of much of the higher level functionality, instead of writing it from scratch.
Hrm... the ReactOS site seems to be offline at the moment. From the Google cache of the announcement of stuff due at the end of Augusy:
- Amongst other features and fixes, this release will include a greatly improved win32k.sys (better, windowing, keyboard support, more routines completed overall), the beginning of an explorer.exe, more controls ported from WINE for user32 (menus, messageboxes and dialogs), greatly improved performance for the standard VGA driver and further work on the NDIS driver.
More options are better. An Open Source version of NT is certainly a Good Thing(tm).Selling software isn't an obsolete business model by any means. We just happen to be at a point where a monopoly has managed to continue to charge an obscene amount of money for what should basically be a commodity item.
You sound like the people who thought that the Internet presented a "whole new paradigm" and that the old business models were obsolete. Turns out they were wrong, and that eventually the dotcom boom turned into a speculative bubble.
The core of what's happening with Open Source is a response to classic market pressures. Office suite software should be dirt cheap by now, not priced at an obscene $300. Heck, it's not just Microsoft - I saw WordPerfect Office at my local Fry's for $300. What are those people smoking?
The response from the market has been to say Screw that - I'd rather write something that people can use for free than keep paying these obscene prices. (In the case of OpenOffice, Sun was also obsessed with finding a way to do some damage to Microsoft.)
The fact that you use software shows that it has some value. Money represents a convenient way of measuring that value. Many of use are willing to pay full price for a new Linux distro. Some are not, and purchase a cheap CD from a second hand retailer. Others are really really cheap and download it for free on their DSL connection. (The fact that they paid $50 a month for a DSL connection shows that the software has value, even though they are too cheap to pay directly).
If the market were running correctly, much of this commercial software would be far cheaper than it is. It wouldn't be worth the time it takes to write an Office suite. Heck, much of this software should probably already be commodity items, sold at no charge.
Open Source software won't eliminate commercial software. But it will make it painful for software companies that try to screw consumers by overpricing their products.
That's a Very Good Thing (tm).
Blender is an OpenGL application, and draws it's own widgets and windows, so it has the same look and feel on all platforms.
Blender has implemented a lot of improvements to the interface from the earlier releases. But (as others have pointed out) 3D animation is hard. Many operations are non-trivial, and require a number of steps. A more clear UI would be helpful, but not under these circumstances.
There are also a lot of 'hidden' functions that people don't know about. For example, there are constant requests for Blender to have more Wings3D sort of modelling features. Blender already supports things like face select and extrude along normal but finding out about them is a different matter. (I doubt I can remember what key combination brings up extrude along normal, and I haven't the foggiest idea how to go about finding it from within Blender.)
Anyhoo, I think what Blender needs is good integrated documentation. The Blender team seems hellbent on keeping the download as small as possible, and don't want to include anything that's not necessary with the core download.
Still, integrated help would solve a number of problems:
Just a thought.
That depends on what you mean by "get the hang of the UI". Sure, you can figure out that buttons can be pushed and that everything in Blender looks like a button. At least form could fit the function, y'know?
The main problem is that the UI doesn't give you any clue how to perform tasks. For example, might know, for example, that you need to add bones to your mesh. But how to do that?
I know that it can be done, but looking through the menus and tabs, I can't see hide nor hare of anything like a Add Bones option. Once the bones are added, how are they supposed to be parented to the mesh? Again, the UI doesn't give any clue.
Just because you (or any other number of users) can figure out how to do great things in Blender - and Blender is an amazingly powerful program - doesn't mean that it's got a good UI. I could just as easily point to the Persistance of Vision Raytracer and claim that it's got a great user interface, because lots of people can use it and produce great work with it.
It's great that you can memorize a zillion different keystrokes, but I can't. That means I can't use Blender without an Internet connection, so I can download the outdated manual, or search for an outdated tutorial, or head over to the friendly folk on #blenderchat for some help.
- Most people that complain about Blender and it's interface haven't read any of the documentation on it and spent 30 minutes trying to figure it out.
Well, the same goes for most people who use any software. But one of the points of a UI is to expose functionality of the product. And that's something that Blender does terribly, even for someone like me who's been struggling with the UI for a couple years.There are other Free software programs that support animation, such as Art of Illusion and Anim8or. There are up and coming contenders, such as JPatch and Wings3D that don't yet support animation, but promise to in the near future. As powerful as Blender is, I'm hanging my hopes one one of these less powerful, but more user friendly applications.
(In fairness should note that Ton has recently set up a forum for the improvement of Blender, and one of the main focuses on Blender 2.0 will be an improved user interface.)
- ...the complexity is too great for an untrained ear to really understand.
The same can be said of any sort of music.No, sorry. At the time, classical music had just as many hacks cranking out crappy music in the classical style. Time has managed to weed out a great deal of the mediocre stuff, but you still have tons of bland, uninteresting stuff.
Then, like today, true genius was ignored, and mediocrity was rewarded. The system was a bit different - there was a patronage of the rich, rather than a control by a media monpoly - but it still sucked to be a musician.
Consider for example J. S. Bach. He was considered a provincial composer, and admired by a select few - Mozart only became familiar with his work - and fairly late in his career - because of commissions from a patron who happend to be a J. S. Bach devotee.
At it's heart, the "classical" style is built around a dance form with various extensions - repetitions, delays, extensions, elaborations. There's a huge amount of classical music that does exactly that, with such a mind-numbingly lack of ideas that even the Beastie Boys sound refreshing in contrast. At least jazz redirects the delayed cadence in interesting directions.
As for the nature vs. nurture argument, I'll certainly believe that there are people with massive amounts of inborn talent.
But I'll take my cue from J. S. Bach, and believe that with or without talent, working your ass off is always a good plan. Even a poor student can become better, and many great composers revisited Fux's Gradus Ad Parnassus (a classic textbook on counterpoint) with great effect.
You can find examples of Cope/EMI compositions in MIDI and PDF format here.
Cope has written extensively about EMI in Computers and Musical Style and Experiments in Musical Intelligence. In the second volume, he includes a "mini" version of EMI called Sara, which is written in LISP and will run on a Mac. You can also find the source here.
Sara works by reassembling works of a composer to form new works. Basically, Cope "distills" a composer's work by simplifying the texture, changing the key, and doing other things that make it more amenable to recomposition.
Then the work is fed into Sara, which analyzes each bar based on harmonic function, melodic function, and so on. These analyzed chunks are then stored in a database.
To "recompose" a work, Sara picks a composition to use as the base. It then replaces each bar in the composition with a functionally equivalent bar from the database, based on harmonic function, melodic direction, and so on. The result is a composition which follows the same general contours of the original work, but has a different melody, texture, and often changed harmony - yet still follows the same stylistic rules of the composer.
EMI is significantly more powerful than Sara. At it's core is a rules-based composition engine, which can generate proper - and perhaps a bit bland - compositions in many styles following music compositional rules. For example, it can even generate a 'proper' four part fugue. EMI's pattern matcher is more sophisticated than Sara's, and EMI is much more subtle in how it weaves a composer's work into it's own. It's even difficult for Cope to tell where the material comes from.
EMI was written primarily to help Cope through a writer's block, and in The Algorithmic Composer he details Alice (ALgorithmically Integrated Composing Environment), yet another incarnation of EMI, which functions as a composer's assistance (included with the text).
Cope is an excellent author, and he makes much of his work understandable to people without a degree in Music Composition or Artificial Intelligence. He's is quite willing to acknowledge and discuss the shortcomings of his programs. In a field where some people consider using fractals as "composition" because the results resemble music, Cope has managed to create something that not only "resembles" music - it's fooled a lot of experts, too.
That's quite a feat.
I recall seeing a video some time back where someone was trying to make some swimmers and walkers from blocks tied together with a simulated spine. The swimmers were great - they eventually evolved into something resembling fish.
The walkers, on the other hand, took advantage of an error in the scoring system. Since they were graded on the distance that they moved, most of the walkers evolved into tall and skinny objects, and simply fell down. The taller they were, the higher the score. Oooops.
But the real issue is that you don't have control over the GA algorithm. You want to be able to specify a particular sort of walk - staggering zombie, happy double bounce. GA won't give you that.
Heck, even Poser gives you that option.
I'm confused... Since this exact same response was posted yesterday, should it be scored as -1, Redundant or +1, Cleverly imitating Spam?
You mean that Microsoft can't ship .NET anymore?
I think that it was unable to load some .INI file, so it was failing. Considering that
The author claimed that it wasn't a QBasic application, but the error messages when it crashes tell a different story.
The QBasic integrated editor was a real joy, and it's hard to find a good, lightweight equal. Python is too big, C++ lacks the "fun" factor...
Lua with the SciTE editor comes close, if only it had builtin help.
I only stopped using QBasic after repeatedly running into the 32K memory barrier. I moved to Euphoria, a nice interpreted language. I missed the QBasic editor that I ended up writing a clone for Euphoria.
Heck, QBasic left such a mark that I ended up writing a Basic interpreter of my own.
Don't get me wrong - Red Carpet has gotten better by leaps and bounds, and when it works, it's wonderful.
Automated software can only go so far in resolving the mess of dependancies, and I finally understand why it wants to uninstall half my machine before I can download some package. But it still makes me a bit leery to go down the Ximian path without some serious functionality (or eye candy) to tempt me.
Since Mandrake 9.1 isn't supported yet (later this week, maybe), that's a bit premature anyway...
Given that (for reasons already discussed in great length) rolling back from a Ximian install is problematic, it would be nice if there were a Live CD (similar to Knoppix) to preview Ximian with.
Unfortunately, Knoppix dropped Gnome because it was just too difficult to get it working. The Morphix folk have a HeavyGUI with Gnome 2.2, so perhaps they will soon have a Ximian desktop release as well.
Has Ximian considered releasing a Live CD?
Well, yes... If you don't count that fact that stores keep track of every item you ever purchase, then no, there was no loss of privacy at all.
I think the idea was that people could track what you purchased after you left the store, which is a bit more insidious.
Maybe you're just being sarcastic. If so, it's too subtle for me.