Last time I tried CSound, I couldn't really get into it, but Pd is nice. The learning curve is admittedly something of a learning cliff, but I think the interface it presents -- a blank canvas on which one draws networks of operators, subpatches, unit generators, etc. -- is close to ideal for this kind of work.
I've still found it to be too much work to build, say, an entire softsynth in Pd (although people have done so), but I've had a lot of luck creating nifty effects boxes, delay units, and audio/data gadgets. Combining it Pd with LADSPA plugins has been especially effective.
I agree with most of your points on Windows, but with Linux you are somewhat overstating your case.
the vast majority of hardware works immediately as soon as you attach it to your computer.
True, but critical items like video cards and wireless cards have a certain chance not to work, although this is entirely due to the driver manufacturers' refusal to release proper specifications for their cards. Even if 95% of the hardware out there works just fine, the average user does not own 95% of the world's hardware -- this user owns a consumer wireless card and is looking forward to a certain amount of futzing with ndiswrapper.
So now we take a task that is not basic -- configuring file associations or default applications is something that very few users attempt -- but call it "very basic" to make it seem like fundamental functionality is missing.
To each their own. Many normal people -- who aren't necessarily power users -- do have a few tricks up their sleeve that they hope to be able to replicate on a different platform.
as more people embrace personal responsibility, thrift and love for their neighbor, we'll hopefully see more people who realize that government IS bad -- and it is better to have a small local government than a large federal one.
Frankly, if people embraced personal responsibility, thrift, and love for their neighbor, we could live under Marxism and we'd do equally well. The extremists on both sides of this argument (small vs. large government) make the same claim: that moving in the correct direction will cause a fundamental shift in human nature. I don't buy it from either side.
Flashplayer is finally using ALSA??? *chorus of angels*. My main complaint with the current Flash (besides being proprietary and being mainly for CPU-hogging flash ads, and leaking memory and occasionally crashing) is that Flash blocks the soundcard.
Perhaps it's a layman's knee-jerk reaction, but it's also a mechnical engineer's knee-jerk reaction. There was a letter in the Boston Globe from an MIT grad who suggested that merely inserting the bolts at a 20-degree angle would have made the force vectors come out more favorably; there was also a diagram in the Boston Globe of a system they're evaluating to replace these bolts, which involves some sort of expansion at the top of the bolt that grips the hole (not being a MechE myself, I don't remember the details); and my last source is the paterfamilias of my household, who is a retired mechanical/optical engineer. His own firm had trouble with bad batches of epoxy (think corrupt and/or incompetent subcontractors -- like on the Big Dig) and with epoxy failing if not prepared exactly correctly (think corrupt and/or incompetent subcontractors under time and money pressure). Finally, according to him, epoxy is much weaker under sheer force than it is under normal force (although this is the sort of thing that would have been revealed in testing, if the tests had not been (apparently) botched or left unperformed).
So perhaps they had no other option but to use this epoxy system. But I think it more likely that the other options were just less expedient to the firms involved, for political or managerial or monetary reasons.
The Boston Globe has been writing some surprisingly in-depth analysis of the failures related to this disaster. Here's what I remember from their reports:
Yes, the epoxy-and-bolt system is extraordinarily dumb. It is not yet clear whether the epoxy was installed correctly, but even if it was, they should not have been relying on it. In some of the other tunnels, they built steel I-beams into the sides of the tunnel to hold up the ceiling panels -- a much more sensible system. The tunnel where the panels fell was not originally supposed to have ceiling panels, but they decided later on that they needed them for ventilation purposes; it was now too late to install the more sensible system, and they used this mickey mouse anchoring system instead. (That being said, there were any number of better and epoxy-free ways to design the anchors.)
One of the subcontractors looked into using lighter (and significantly cheaper) steel panels instead of the heavy concrete ones, but they ran into problems with vibration. They eventually figured out a solution, but now the steel system would have been almost the same price as the concrete, and another authority (I forget which) had already signed the contract to buy the concrete.
The bolts were supposed to be tested to hold twice the weight they would actually be supporting. Instead, they were tested to a margin not much greater than the weight of the concrete panels. Furthermore, it is not clear how many of the bolts were actually tested; this may have gotten swept under the rug due to the extreme cost pressure the project was under.
As usual with engineering disasters of this sort, the failure seems to have been caused by a confluence of lesser mistakes that would not have been tragic in isolation. The root causes, however, seem to be:
Changing requirements late in the game (as any software developer would warn you against)
Cutting corners on safety checks due to budgetary concerns
Bad design
Incompetence and/or curruption on the part of the contractors. Most of the fingers right now are pointing at Bechtel, but who knows what later investigations might reveal.
Anyone who has lived in Boston can tell you that this is only the latest in a string of cost overruns and management failures. The actual mode of failure (i.e. the bolts) and the immediate causes of that failure should not overshadow the idea that the contractors who screwed this one up should be held responsible. The ongoing investigations should reveal whether the contractors were merely incompetent or whether they willfully ignored problems like these and crossed their fingers that nothing would happen.
Heck yes. Perhaps I had the genes in me anyway, but I think that a large part of why I am now a programmer is that my elementary school had computers with qbasic.exe on them.
I'm not sure if Windows lockdowns have changed over the past few years, but try running things from the address bar in Internet Explorer... or from the file->open dialog box in Word.;-)
(For a while, my high school let you run only certain, whitelisted programs... every few weeks, they would go and delete all of the programs labeled "msword.exe" from the student directories. Good times.)
Hey, sounds like CS 225, except for the 8 A.M. bit -- this one had sessions at noon and at 3, and still nobody could be bothered to show up, for much the same reasons. On the other hand, Numerical Methods isn't videotaped, but it's at 9:30 A.M., and though it's taught by a decent professor, the subject matter is as boring as all get-out.
I suppose the moral that one can draw from this is that UIUC CS students don't like to attend lecture. =)
It sounds like they're placing themselves squarely as the 800-pound-gorilla against TextPayMe -- one of the Y Combinator-funded startups. This may be interesting for both parties.
Even within Wikipedia's loose definitions, that's not an authoritative statement, since it doesn't even try to follow the NPOV. Really, nothing is "according to Wikipedia", it's just according to the last person to edit the passage you're reading.
Except that the statement in question happens to be both accurate and NPOV -- the latter because it says "The OSI does not consider 'shared source' to be Open Source" and not "'shared source' is not Open Source". Have I just fed a troll?
I agree that Bush is comparable to Hitler. Clearly, Bush < Hitler. In fact, I would go so far as to say that any two world leaders -- nay, any two strings at all! -- are comparable. </pun>
It would be worth your while to check out WOXY, then. Before they were Internet-only, they were an actual, physical, independent radio station; their DJs do actually play your requests; they actually announce the names of the songs they've played; and you hear more songs than the same 20 over and over.
Of course, you still may or may not like the music that they play, I guess.
I worked at a company where WOXY had been blocked as "pornography". Perhaps a song by the New Pornographers had been on the playlist when the company crawled the site. Or perhaps the filters are clueless and easily flummoxed.... does anybody else remember when censorware was a big deal? What happened?
Your argument about racism is well-worn - you should read The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould, for an alternate perspective on the idea of "group IQ". In short, it sounds plausible (and perhaps appealing or convenient to some) that the average IQ of different racial groups could follow a bell curve, but it doesn't actually turn out to be that way in reality.
Unfortunately, allowing registered users to filter the stories doesn't solve the problem of these spammers using story submissions to improve their PageRank on dubious sites.
E.g. reddit.com code is mostly a rather thin wrapper around database + Web server, so free Common Lisp implementation may not be a best tool for the job. It may be better to use a commercial CL implementation or some other language (such as Python) in such cases, depending on how much money & spare time you have.
It is funny that you should mention Python as a replacement for LISP in the context of Reddit: they indeed recently switched from Python to LISP, rewriting their whole application in about a week.
Easy to use? You've got to be joking. GRUB is certainly much more featureful than LILO, but I've never quite been able to figure out how to configure it manually if it goes bonkers. LILO's configuration syntax is far more straightforward.
I've helped many people in the rooms around me (in the dorm) set up Ubuntu, and I think that GRUB was one of the largest sources of trouble (after the ATI graphics cards). It probably didn't help that some of them had weird physical setups (both IDE and SATA on the same computer, for example), but at least with LILO i knew how to reinstall it from a bootdisk/liveCD.
In a similar vein, it should not be surprising that the students participating in the study were gathered from the University of Illinois, where (to quote a columnist from the Daily Illini) weekends start on Thursday and St. Patrick's Day is celebrated between two and four times per year.
ObDisclaimer: most of those shenanigans are on the other side of campus from the engineering dorm....
You should probably read the Wikipedia description of NPOV and determine whether you in fact disagree with it. As it is expressed in actual pages, NPOV usually means presenting multiple viewpoints, weighted in proportion to the general "neutral" consensus.
(Alternatively, you may be more interested in Wikinfo, which attempts to provide a "sympathetic POV" instead of a neutral POV.)
If you see a particularly bad page, you can attach a tag to it to indicate that it is in need of copy-editing. I agree that the spelling and grammar are often atrocious, but at least there are protocols for dealing with the most egregious examples.
Interestingly, I have noticed that the overall stylistic quality of articles varies widely based on the knowledge domain. This is a completely different correlation than knowledge domain vs. article thoroughness -- it just seems, unsurprisingly, that people interested in certain topics tend to have a higher average quality of writing than those interested in other topics.
Actually, being unclean in the Biblical sense is not a huge deal. Cohanim (people descended from the priests) are supposed to avoid it, but other than that, it doesn't really matter. It's not a "sin", in whatever sense you define that word. Plus, all it takes is a simple ritual immersion to fix uncleanliness (unless you're, say, a leper).
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I tried CSound, I couldn't really get into it, but Pd is nice. The learning curve is admittedly something of a learning cliff, but I think the interface it presents -- a blank canvas on which one draws networks of operators, subpatches, unit generators, etc. -- is close to ideal for this kind of work.
I've still found it to be too much work to build, say, an entire softsynth in Pd (although people have done so), but I've had a lot of luck creating nifty effects boxes, delay units, and audio/data gadgets. Combining it Pd with LADSPA plugins has been especially effective.
True, but critical items like video cards and wireless cards have a certain chance not to work, although this is entirely due to the driver manufacturers' refusal to release proper specifications for their cards. Even if 95% of the hardware out there works just fine, the average user does not own 95% of the world's hardware -- this user owns a consumer wireless card and is looking forward to a certain amount of futzing with ndiswrapper.
To each their own. Many normal people -- who aren't necessarily power users -- do have a few tricks up their sleeve that they hope to be able to replicate on a different platform.
What do you mean? .02 cents == .02 dollars! (especially if you're Verizon)
Frankly, if people embraced personal responsibility, thrift, and love for their neighbor, we could live under Marxism and we'd do equally well. The extremists on both sides of this argument (small vs. large government) make the same claim: that moving in the correct direction will cause a fundamental shift in human nature. I don't buy it from either side.
Flashplayer is finally using ALSA??? *chorus of angels*. My main complaint with the current Flash (besides being proprietary and being mainly for CPU-hogging flash ads, and leaking memory and occasionally crashing) is that Flash blocks the soundcard.
Perhaps it's a layman's knee-jerk reaction, but it's also a mechnical engineer's knee-jerk reaction. There was a letter in the Boston Globe from an MIT grad who suggested that merely inserting the bolts at a 20-degree angle would have made the force vectors come out more favorably; there was also a diagram in the Boston Globe of a system they're evaluating to replace these bolts, which involves some sort of expansion at the top of the bolt that grips the hole (not being a MechE myself, I don't remember the details); and my last source is the paterfamilias of my household, who is a retired mechanical/optical engineer. His own firm had trouble with bad batches of epoxy (think corrupt and/or incompetent subcontractors -- like on the Big Dig) and with epoxy failing if not prepared exactly correctly (think corrupt and/or incompetent subcontractors under time and money pressure). Finally, according to him, epoxy is much weaker under sheer force than it is under normal force (although this is the sort of thing that would have been revealed in testing, if the tests had not been (apparently) botched or left unperformed).
So perhaps they had no other option but to use this epoxy system. But I think it more likely that the other options were just less expedient to the firms involved, for political or managerial or monetary reasons.
As usual with engineering disasters of this sort, the failure seems to have been caused by a confluence of lesser mistakes that would not have been tragic in isolation. The root causes, however, seem to be:
Anyone who has lived in Boston can tell you that this is only the latest in a string of cost overruns and management failures. The actual mode of failure (i.e. the bolts) and the immediate causes of that failure should not overshadow the idea that the contractors who screwed this one up should be held responsible. The ongoing investigations should reveal whether the contractors were merely incompetent or whether they willfully ignored problems like these and crossed their fingers that nothing would happen.
Heck yes. Perhaps I had the genes in me anyway, but I think that a large part of why I am now a programmer is that my elementary school had computers with qbasic.exe on them.
I'm not sure if Windows lockdowns have changed over the past few years, but try running things from the address bar in Internet Explorer... or from the file->open dialog box in Word. ;-)
(For a while, my high school let you run only certain, whitelisted programs... every few weeks, they would go and delete all of the programs labeled "msword.exe" from the student directories. Good times.)
Hey, sounds like CS 225, except for the 8 A.M. bit -- this one had sessions at noon and at 3, and still nobody could be bothered to show up, for much the same reasons. On the other hand, Numerical Methods isn't videotaped, but it's at 9:30 A.M., and though it's taught by a decent professor, the subject matter is as boring as all get-out.
I suppose the moral that one can draw from this is that UIUC CS students don't like to attend lecture. =)
It sounds like they're placing themselves squarely as the 800-pound-gorilla against TextPayMe -- one of the Y Combinator-funded startups. This may be interesting for both parties.
Except that the statement in question happens to be both accurate and NPOV -- the latter because it says "The OSI does not consider 'shared source' to be Open Source" and not "'shared source' is not Open Source". Have I just fed a troll?
I agree that Bush is comparable to Hitler. Clearly, Bush < Hitler. In fact, I would go so far as to say that any two world leaders -- nay, any two strings at all! -- are comparable.
</pun>
It would be worth your while to check out WOXY, then. Before they were Internet-only, they were an actual, physical, independent radio station; their DJs do actually play your requests; they actually announce the names of the songs they've played; and you hear more songs than the same 20 over and over.
Of course, you still may or may not like the music that they play, I guess.
I worked at a company where WOXY had been blocked as "pornography". Perhaps a song by the New Pornographers had been on the playlist when the company crawled the site. Or perhaps the filters are clueless and easily flummoxed. ... does anybody else remember when censorware was a big deal? What happened?
IHBT.
Take once per day until desire for DRM subsides, and weekly thereafter.
DRM scares me.
Your argument about racism is well-worn - you should read The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould, for an alternate perspective on the idea of "group IQ". In short, it sounds plausible (and perhaps appealing or convenient to some) that the average IQ of different racial groups could follow a bell curve, but it doesn't actually turn out to be that way in reality.
Unfortunately, allowing registered users to filter the stories doesn't solve the problem of these spammers using story submissions to improve their PageRank on dubious sites.
It is funny that you should mention Python as a replacement for LISP in the context of Reddit: they indeed recently switched from Python to LISP, rewriting their whole application in about a week.
Easy to use? You've got to be joking. GRUB is certainly much more featureful than LILO, but I've never quite been able to figure out how to configure it manually if it goes bonkers. LILO's configuration syntax is far more straightforward.
I've helped many people in the rooms around me (in the dorm) set up Ubuntu, and I think that GRUB was one of the largest sources of trouble (after the ATI graphics cards). It probably didn't help that some of them had weird physical setups (both IDE and SATA on the same computer, for example), but at least with LILO i knew how to reinstall it from a bootdisk/liveCD.
In a similar vein, it should not be surprising that the students participating in the study were gathered from the University of Illinois, where (to quote a columnist from the Daily Illini) weekends start on Thursday and St. Patrick's Day is celebrated between two and four times per year.
ObDisclaimer: most of those shenanigans are on the other side of campus from the engineering dorm....
You should probably read the Wikipedia description of NPOV and determine whether you in fact disagree with it. As it is expressed in actual pages, NPOV usually means presenting multiple viewpoints, weighted in proportion to the general "neutral" consensus.
(Alternatively, you may be more interested in Wikinfo, which attempts to provide a "sympathetic POV" instead of a neutral POV.)
If you see a particularly bad page, you can attach a tag to it to indicate that it is in need of copy-editing. I agree that the spelling and grammar are often atrocious, but at least there are protocols for dealing with the most egregious examples.
Interestingly, I have noticed that the overall stylistic quality of articles varies widely based on the knowledge domain. This is a completely different correlation than knowledge domain vs. article thoroughness -- it just seems, unsurprisingly, that people interested in certain topics tend to have a higher average quality of writing than those interested in other topics.
Actually, being unclean in the Biblical sense is not a huge deal. Cohanim (people descended from the priests) are supposed to avoid it, but other than that, it doesn't really matter. It's not a "sin", in whatever sense you define that word. Plus, all it takes is a simple ritual immersion to fix uncleanliness (unless you're, say, a leper).