This. Mod parent up, a lot. Don't blame the technology if people don't teach interesting stuff with it.
Wow. The 1990 me could have made a lot more than silly BASIC dungeon crawlers and bloopy ProTracker mods with today's tech. If I had a time machine, I would send back a He-Man backpack filled with stuff like:
An iPad, with lots of fun editors, music, art, other creative apps (and probably They Might Be Giant's Flood).
A Raspberry Pi, battery pack, and I/O dongles.
An Arduino or two, with some shields, sensors, motors, etc.
A Dungeon Master's Guide, headphones, some Xanth and Discworld books, and other reasons to beat me up:-)
I use apps like Pythonista and Textastic on a regular basis. They work great. Pythonista even has built-in Python docs, tutorials, and their own Xcode SDK wrappers. I also cart around a Raspberry Pi with a WiFi dongle, New Trent rechargeable battery, and a nice little shell script to create a network on boot, sync my git repos, etc. If I can't do it on the iPad directly, I can bootup the Raspi and connect via SSH/SFTP/HTTP easily.
If schools are just doing the same old thing with iPads, or drinking the snake-oil-salesmen-turned-courseware-vendor Kool Aid, don't blame the tools.
For all of you who felt this news like a punch in the face, find solace in your fellow geeks; let's meet after work, wherever we are today, and raise a glass for 'taco and the/. gang.
I found slashdot on my first day of work, in my first real programming job back in college, and have been bathing in its pale green light ever since. This calls for beer!
I recently attended a Jimbo lecture. During the Q&A bit, I asked him what challenges he thought Wikipedia might face into the future, as the number of articles approaches millions (I was asking from a data design, semantic web perspective - the number was hyperbolical). His response was something along the lines of "I hope it never reaches a million articles."
What. The. Frak.
I understand the desire to keep things reasonable, but new stuff happens/is created/is experienced every day. To me, this view is hopelessly short-sighted. What's the point of Wikipedia 100 years from now if we delete everything that any statistically insignificant portion of the population thinks is no longer notable, especially without a valid historical context? Shouldn't we instead focus on solving the inherent design problems that stem from using a 19th century taxonomic model in a paper paradigm? Seriously dude, it's a freaking database, not a book. Yes, MediaWiki+MySQL has limits, but nothing compared to a physical book.
In my view, this whole situation implies that Wikipedia is just operating at the fundamentally wrong level of abstraction.
Please mod parent up. A lot. For me, the whole point of/. is having one place to go for salient, well-curated geek news. The more more fluff, the less value - simple as that.
The Fluid Project is just getting off the ground, and it is focused on higher ed, but their wiki might be a good place to hang out, if you want to talk to serious HCI geeks. I've talked to some folks at conferences about it, and they have some hardcore research components to their work - you know, users, and researchers, and people writing down what happens:-)
"Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project to help improve the usability and accessibility of community open source projects with a focus on academic software for universities. We are developing and will freely distribute a library of sharable customizable user interfaces designed to improve the user experience of web applications"
Do the bean counters actually read slashdot? I don't care about beans, I care about quality and deadlines. It doesn't matter how cheaply we can develop something if it's crappy and five years late. The are plenty of people out there that... oh, wait:-)
If your organization sees quality and timeliness as 'hidden', I suggest you run away. Like, really. Stop typing, stop reading; stand up, turn around, and run like hell.
I know that the term 'data' is generally used as a singular in informal speech, but it still drives me nuts. I bet there are a lot of other current or former Latin club members that howl at this literary fingernails-on-chalkboard usage of the term. Not that I stayed after school for Latin club meetings, or to play Civ, or D&D...
Silently weeps into his tattered copy of Remedia Amoris
Roland patented and employed a suspiciously similar tech years ago for their V-Drum electronic percussion system. Perhaps Roland's patents only apply to musical instruments, but the concept of deriving placement and distance from piezo electric sensors is nothing new.
Although TFA is interesting, it horrendously conflates archaeology, cultural anthropology, historiography, and several other 'ologies and 'ographies. Not to mention the dramatic differences between how we approach the study of history and prehistory, texts and physical remains.
Archaeology, although often informed and assisted by historical texts and contemporary analogs, is primarily concern with understanding the physical record and its disposition. There are many interesting studies of Wikipedia and other data sources going on as we type. I overheard many interesting conversations mention it by name at least year's AAA meeting (American Anthropological Association). Although there's much to be learned from texts and the factors that form them (electronic or otherwise), archaeologists are still digging, and will for some time. At least until humans transcend corporeal form and stop depositing junk everywhere we go. Seriously, it's not that unusual to spot modern urban archaeologists picking through trash dumps and landfills. The physical record is teaching us about things from the last 20-30 years that history texts already got 'wrong', so-to-speak.
Also, see circletimessquare's comment regarding the persistence of the physical record (or lack thereof). That's becoming the archaeologist's Soviet Russia joke.
I see your point, but your implication of religious affiliation begs the question even further. Here in Ohio, the vast majority of private colleges and universities shed their official religious affiliations during the liberal arts schism of the early twentieth century. Those that did are generally referred to as 'religious' institutions. I would not argue that one type/position is better than another, but it would be foolhardy to think that differing views/dogmas wouldn't directly impact social policy.
I am not aware of any of what I would consider my university's 'peer institutions' (residential, private liberal arts colleges and universities with less than 5k in enrollment) that have implemented content-based filtering. Furthermore, such topics became hot for debate amoungst the broader, all-forms-of-higher-education professional organizations in the early 2000s, and nobody seemed to think it was a good idea. I see many posts in this thread describing various bandwidth-throttling schemes that do not involve RBLs or content filters, which seems to match my impression of the current industry trends.
My experience is by no means all-encompassing, but my career and research have taken me across a vary broad subsection of higher education. It's good to understand one's own biases the best one can, I suppose.
Back to writing code in my liberal arts bubble now!
I serve in the IT management team at a small private university, and we don NOT filter or censor ANY traffic based on content. This is commonly discussed at various meetings regarding technology and higher ed (just google around on the http://educause.edu/ website). Packet shaping based on protocol our IP address are one thing, but blacklisting and content blocking is blatant censorship. Our faculty would have us hanged if we implemented such a policy.
There is no "AutoRun" feature within Mac OS itself, and I don't think there ever has been. Quicktime had a similar function several versions ago (which could be disabled by removing/not loading the extension), but that was removed due to fear of malicious use, AFAIK.
Mac OS X will automatically open a Finder window upon mounting read-only media (and usually network volumes as well), but no code is executed.
It's obvious that this isn't a virus in the same sense that windows users are accustomed to (read: != outlook worm). It is, however, a good reminder for users everywhere that malicious code can still find its way into your hot little hands.
Dumb people will still double-click on anything in sight, until their screen/RAM is completely full, then reboot and start over. Maybe we should just hand out Etch-a-Sketch's and call them laptops, a-la Dilbert.
Although learning extra languages is great, children who are raised in truly bilingual environments often show slightly lower math and science comprehension, particularly at the lower grade levels. I'm not sure why that is, but it was considered true when I took undergrad Anthropology. I suppose it could be sysmptom or a side effect...
Homes and schools that truly integrate multiple languages might want to keep the above in mind, and adjust pedagogy accordingly.
I know people have already made a similar suggestion, but there's a vendor or two that make venitlated isolation racks for pro audio gear, some of which may provide enough space for your box. Raxxess makes the isoraxx line. I'd measure your G5 and see if it'll fit. That investment might benefit other hardware that you want to isolate as well.
I know somebody used to make rackmount ears for the G4 towers, but I've not seen such things for G5 cases.
Having principles make you feel dirty sometimes, as when you are forced into a pragmatic decision such as getting a mac because you don't have enough ability to get Linux/BSD/WhateverFreeOS running well, for example.
Although that's a valid example, I doubt that people without enough ability to get Linux/BSD/WhateverFreeOS running well represents much of the Mac OS X user base. There are quite a few linux distros that are dead-easy to install. I choose to use a Mac because all the software and hardware I use runs flawlessly on Mac OS X (Digital Performer, MachV, Peak, Max/MSP, Final Cut, lots of I/O hardware and synths).
Vendor lock-in may be bad, but "driver lock-out" sucks too. In terms of full-scale pro audio/MIDI interfaces, the RME hammerfall and MOTU serial XT's are about the only devices that I know of that work well under linux. I don't think the old XT's are even made anymore; a friend of mine got one on eBay for the last linux-based project I worked on. I'd love to hear about support for other devices.
Projects like the Agnula distro and the myriad audio packages are making great strides, but I doubt I'll make my next album on linux. I still keep slack and mandrake boxes to watch and play, though.
It's a well documented fact that the crack on the G4 Cube was actually the seam in the injection mold. We have an entire lab of these machines, and I checked them all: no cracks, just seams. Many people saw the line in the plastic and thought it was a crack.
I guess Apple could have laser-carved the entire chassis out of acrylic, but that probably would have added a grand to the retail price.
I'm just as excited 'bout this as the next guy. I've tried audio on linux many times over the years, but it's never worked enough to leave the Mac platform. However, an audio software environment (DAW) is only a small portion of the software/hardware mix.
Good, solid, pro hardware (audio, midi, video I/O) costs an order of magnitude more than software. Hell, most ProTools software comes free (as in beer) with most of their top hardware packages. Digital Performer is only a small upgrade-leap away from the free version that comes with their hardware.
So, $13,999.99 of that pro setup goes into a nice computer rig, good converters, good harddisks, preamps, effects, cables, etc. This isn't even counting acoustic treatment of the rooms, or a nice mixing surface. Oh yeah, and we need linux drivers for all of this as well. I believe there are Delta series drivers for the M-Audio interfaces, and the Hammerfalls, but not much else in the pro realm.
Let's show projects like Ardour some support and beat on hardware vendors to help with drivers!!! *grabs his hardware vendor beating stick*
ProTools is great, but other DAWs have come along
on
Cheap Audio Production
·
· Score: 1
I'm sure millions of people have posted this, but there are several DAWs that have crossed the line to full production environment. Digital Performer, for instance, has all the hardware and software that DigiDesign has. MOTU (the maker of Performer) has a whole line of 96k/192K HD interfaces (using the same conversion chips, so don't even bother posting about how they don't sound as good as the ProTools converters). There are many options for MIDI, and quite a few control surfaces.
The only things I see that ProTools has over DP, Sonar, Logic, or Nuendo is the huge control surfaces and a wide install base. Digital Performer is much better at MIDI sequencing/notation, surround mixing, looping/sequencing, you name it. The hardware is cheaper, and has all the pro-level I/O.
Frankly, the $495 intro price for ProTools is a myth. That particular package, the M-Box, has gotten horrible reviews. They really skimped on the quality of components: noisy inputs, poor stability, etc. I personally know people that exchanged those intefaces within days for an M-Audio or MOTU device. The fact that ProTools (non-free, supported versions) only runs on DigiDesign hardware is also pretty crummy. Back in the day they had the best interrfaces, but that was some time ago. The main studio I work in is shifting completely to MOTU.
No, I don't work for MOTU, I'm just a very happy switcher.
This seemed like a cool thing to try, as I've been following the Linux development for a while, but I can't seem to find "dlcompat_dev" in fink, and the film-gimp install fails without it.
As far as I can tell, my fink config is listing all trees. I know it wouldn't break my arm to install something manually, but it's just nice to see more complete install packages.
Otherwise, congrats to the team on another much needed media tool for OS X!
... can be just as bad. I read a letter from the editor of my favorite audio magazine not too long ago, where he complained of too many honey-dripped, 101 out of 10 star reviews in competing magazines.
What some magazines (and perhaps websites) having going for them is trust and familiarity. If I read reviews from a particular writer over an extended period, I begin to understand WHY they write what they write. If a reviewer specializes in live sound, he may tear up a high-grade microphone as too expensive, when a studio engineer might praise it highly. Likewise, someone who is obsessed with a particular author may write a glowing review of what others call crap.
I guess it's good to know how big of a grain of salt you should take with a given review.
Slashdot Mirror
This. Mod parent up, a lot. Don't blame the technology if people don't teach interesting stuff with it.
Wow. The 1990 me could have made a lot more than silly BASIC dungeon crawlers and bloopy ProTracker mods with today's tech. If I had a time machine, I would send back a He-Man backpack filled with stuff like:
I use apps like Pythonista and Textastic on a regular basis. They work great. Pythonista even has built-in Python docs, tutorials, and their own Xcode SDK wrappers. I also cart around a Raspberry Pi with a WiFi dongle, New Trent rechargeable battery, and a nice little shell script to create a network on boot, sync my git repos, etc. If I can't do it on the iPad directly, I can bootup the Raspi and connect via SSH/SFTP/HTTP easily.
If schools are just doing the same old thing with iPads, or drinking the snake-oil-salesmen-turned-courseware-vendor Kool Aid, don't blame the tools.
For all of you who felt this news like a punch in the face, find solace in your fellow geeks; let's meet after work, wherever we are today, and raise a glass for 'taco and the /. gang.
I found slashdot on my first day of work, in my first real programming job back in college, and have been bathing in its pale green light ever since. This calls for beer!
osu-neko++
I recently attended a Jimbo lecture. During the Q&A bit, I asked him what challenges he thought Wikipedia might face into the future, as the number of articles approaches millions (I was asking from a data design, semantic web perspective - the number was hyperbolical). His response was something along the lines of "I hope it never reaches a million articles."
What. The. Frak.
I understand the desire to keep things reasonable, but new stuff happens/is created/is experienced every day. To me, this view is hopelessly short-sighted. What's the point of Wikipedia 100 years from now if we delete everything that any statistically insignificant portion of the population thinks is no longer notable, especially without a valid historical context? Shouldn't we instead focus on solving the inherent design problems that stem from using a 19th century taxonomic model in a paper paradigm? Seriously dude, it's a freaking database, not a book. Yes, MediaWiki+MySQL has limits, but nothing compared to a physical book.
In my view, this whole situation implies that Wikipedia is just operating at the fundamentally wrong level of abstraction.
Please mod parent up. A lot. For me, the whole point of /. is having one place to go for salient, well-curated geek news. The more more fluff, the less value - simple as that.
-foo
The Fluid Project is just getting off the ground, and it is focused on higher ed, but their wiki might be a good place to hang out, if you want to talk to serious HCI geeks. I've talked to some folks at conferences about it, and they have some hardcore research components to their work - you know, users, and researchers, and people writing down what happens :-)
From http://fluidproject.org/ ---
"Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project to help improve the usability and accessibility of community open source projects with a focus on academic software for universities. We are developing and will freely distribute a library of sharable customizable user interfaces designed to improve the user experience of web applications"
Do the bean counters actually read slashdot? I don't care about beans, I care about quality and deadlines. It doesn't matter how cheaply we can develop something if it's crappy and five years late. The are plenty of people out there that... oh, wait :-)
If your organization sees quality and timeliness as 'hidden', I suggest you run away. Like, really. Stop typing, stop reading; stand up, turn around, and run like hell.
-Foo
I know that the term 'data' is generally used as a singular in informal speech, but it still drives me nuts. I bet there are a lot of other current or former Latin club members that howl at this literary fingernails-on-chalkboard usage of the term. Not that I stayed after school for Latin club meetings, or to play Civ, or D&D...
Silently weeps into his tattered copy of Remedia Amoris
-Foo
Roland patented and employed a suspiciously similar tech years ago for their V-Drum electronic percussion system. Perhaps Roland's patents only apply to musical instruments, but the concept of deriving placement and distance from piezo electric sensors is nothing new.
Although TFA is interesting, it horrendously conflates archaeology, cultural anthropology, historiography, and several other 'ologies and 'ographies. Not to mention the dramatic differences between how we approach the study of history and prehistory, texts and physical remains.
Archaeology, although often informed and assisted by historical texts and contemporary analogs, is primarily concern with understanding the physical record and its disposition. There are many interesting studies of Wikipedia and other data sources going on as we type. I overheard many interesting conversations mention it by name at least year's AAA meeting (American Anthropological Association). Although there's much to be learned from texts and the factors that form them (electronic or otherwise), archaeologists are still digging, and will for some time. At least until humans transcend corporeal form and stop depositing junk everywhere we go. Seriously, it's not that unusual to spot modern urban archaeologists picking through trash dumps and landfills. The physical record is teaching us about things from the last 20-30 years that history texts already got 'wrong', so-to-speak.
Also, see circletimessquare's comment regarding the persistence of the physical record (or lack thereof). That's becoming the archaeologist's Soviet Russia joke.
I see your point, but your implication of religious affiliation begs the question even further. Here in Ohio, the vast majority of private colleges and universities shed their official religious affiliations during the liberal arts schism of the early twentieth century. Those that did are generally referred to as 'religious' institutions. I would not argue that one type/position is better than another, but it would be foolhardy to think that differing views/dogmas wouldn't directly impact social policy.
I am not aware of any of what I would consider my university's 'peer institutions' (residential, private liberal arts colleges and universities with less than 5k in enrollment) that have implemented content-based filtering. Furthermore, such topics became hot for debate amoungst the broader, all-forms-of-higher-education professional organizations in the early 2000s, and nobody seemed to think it was a good idea. I see many posts in this thread describing various bandwidth-throttling schemes that do not involve RBLs or content filters, which seems to match my impression of the current industry trends.
My experience is by no means all-encompassing, but my career and research have taken me across a vary broad subsection of higher education. It's good to understand one's own biases the best one can, I suppose.
Back to writing code in my liberal arts bubble now!
I serve in the IT management team at a small private university, and we don NOT filter or censor ANY traffic based on content. This is commonly discussed at various meetings regarding technology and higher ed (just google around on the http://educause.edu/ website). Packet shaping based on protocol our IP address are one thing, but blacklisting and content blocking is blatant censorship. Our faculty would have us hanged if we implemented such a policy.
Damn it, I just said that ! :-)
...except the parchment contained writings from a copy of Archimedes' Palimpsest.
:-)
The object in question IS the palimpsest, not the text hidden on it. At least NPR got that much right
Safari -> Preferences -> General -> 'Open "safe" files after downloading'
-FooThere is no "AutoRun" feature within Mac OS itself, and I don't think there ever has been. Quicktime had a similar function several versions ago (which could be disabled by removing/not loading the extension), but that was removed due to fear of malicious use, AFAIK.
Mac OS X will automatically open a Finder window upon mounting read-only media (and usually network volumes as well), but no code is executed.
Not sayin' it's good or bad, just sayin'.
-Foo
It's obvious that this isn't a virus in the same sense that windows users are accustomed to (read: != outlook worm). It is, however, a good reminder for users everywhere that malicious code can still find its way into your hot little hands.
Dumb people will still double-click on anything in sight, until their screen/RAM is completely full, then reboot and start over. Maybe we should just hand out Etch-a-Sketch's and call them laptops, a-la Dilbert.
*shake-shake-shake*
-Foo
Although learning extra languages is great, children who are raised in truly bilingual environments often show slightly lower math and science comprehension, particularly at the lower grade levels. I'm not sure why that is, but it was considered true when I took undergrad Anthropology. I suppose it could be sysmptom or a side effect...
Homes and schools that truly integrate multiple languages might want to keep the above in mind, and adjust pedagogy accordingly.
-Foo
I know people have already made a similar suggestion, but there's a vendor or two that make venitlated isolation racks for pro audio gear, some of which may provide enough space for your box. Raxxess makes the isoraxx line. I'd measure your G5 and see if it'll fit. That investment might benefit other hardware that you want to isolate as well.
I know somebody used to make rackmount ears for the G4 towers, but I've not seen such things for G5 cases.
-Foo
Although that's a valid example, I doubt that people without enough ability to get Linux/BSD/WhateverFreeOS running well represents much of the Mac OS X user base. There are quite a few linux distros that are dead-easy to install. I choose to use a Mac because all the software and hardware I use runs flawlessly on Mac OS X (Digital Performer, MachV, Peak, Max/MSP, Final Cut, lots of I/O hardware and synths).
Vendor lock-in may be bad, but "driver lock-out" sucks too. In terms of full-scale pro audio/MIDI interfaces, the RME hammerfall and MOTU serial XT's are about the only devices that I know of that work well under linux. I don't think the old XT's are even made anymore; a friend of mine got one on eBay for the last linux-based project I worked on. I'd love to hear about support for other devices.
Projects like the Agnula distro and the myriad audio packages are making great strides, but I doubt I'll make my next album on linux. I still keep slack and mandrake boxes to watch and play, though.
-Foo
It's a well documented fact that the crack on the G4 Cube was actually the seam in the injection mold. We have an entire lab of these machines, and I checked them all: no cracks, just seams. Many people saw the line in the plastic and thought it was a crack.
I guess Apple could have laser-carved the entire chassis out of acrylic, but that probably would have added a grand to the retail price.
I'm just as excited 'bout this as the next guy. I've tried audio on linux many times over the years, but it's never worked enough to leave the Mac platform. However, an audio software environment (DAW) is only a small portion of the software/hardware mix.
Good, solid, pro hardware (audio, midi, video I/O) costs an order of magnitude more than software. Hell, most ProTools software comes free (as in beer) with most of their top hardware packages. Digital Performer is only a small upgrade-leap away from the free version that comes with their hardware.
So, $13,999.99 of that pro setup goes into a nice computer rig, good converters, good harddisks, preamps, effects, cables, etc. This isn't even counting acoustic treatment of the rooms, or a nice mixing surface. Oh yeah, and we need linux drivers for all of this as well. I believe there are Delta series drivers for the M-Audio interfaces, and the Hammerfalls, but not much else in the pro realm.
Let's show projects like Ardour some support and beat on hardware vendors to help with drivers!!! *grabs his hardware vendor beating stick*
I'm sure millions of people have posted this, but there are several DAWs that have crossed the line to full production environment. Digital Performer, for instance, has all the hardware and software that DigiDesign has. MOTU (the maker of Performer) has a whole line of 96k/192K HD interfaces (using the same conversion chips, so don't even bother posting about how they don't sound as good as the ProTools converters). There are many options for MIDI, and quite a few control surfaces.
The only things I see that ProTools has over DP, Sonar, Logic, or Nuendo is the huge control surfaces and a wide install base. Digital Performer is much better at MIDI sequencing/notation, surround mixing, looping/sequencing, you name it. The hardware is cheaper, and has all the pro-level I/O.
Frankly, the $495 intro price for ProTools is a myth. That particular package, the M-Box, has gotten horrible reviews. They really skimped on the quality of components: noisy inputs, poor stability, etc. I personally know people that exchanged those intefaces within days for an M-Audio or MOTU device. The fact that ProTools (non-free, supported versions) only runs on DigiDesign hardware is also pretty crummy. Back in the day they had the best interrfaces, but that was some time ago. The main studio I work in is shifting completely to MOTU.
No, I don't work for MOTU, I'm just a very happy switcher.
This seemed like a cool thing to try, as I've been following the Linux development for a while, but I can't seem to find "dlcompat_dev" in fink, and the film-gimp install fails without it.
As far as I can tell, my fink config is listing all trees. I know it wouldn't break my arm to install something manually, but it's just nice to see more complete install packages.
Otherwise, congrats to the team on another much needed media tool for OS X!
... can be just as bad. I read a letter from the editor of my favorite audio magazine not too long ago, where he complained of too many honey-dripped, 101 out of 10 star reviews in competing magazines.
What some magazines (and perhaps websites) having going for them is trust and familiarity. If I read reviews from a particular writer over an extended period, I begin to understand WHY they write what they write. If a reviewer specializes in live sound, he may tear up a high-grade microphone as too expensive, when a studio engineer might praise it highly. Likewise, someone who is obsessed with a particular author may write a glowing review of what others call crap.
I guess it's good to know how big of a grain of salt you should take with a given review.