Dude I ain't coded in more than half a decade and my only coding exp was VB 6 which is as dead as Disco. For these programs to work they would need to be coded for speed and VB was a lot of things but a close to real time language it wasn't. You might be able to get the EQ analyzer written in VB but the pedals would probably have to be written in either assembly or maybe C, something that runs as close to bare metal as humanly possible to keep the tracking real time and my skills are nowhere near that. I wrote VB GUIs to local DBs for places like junkyards, not exactly the kind of work that would lend itself to writing a music app.
Besides one would have to be good at math and frankly its been too many years since I've needed more than basic math and I now suck at it. They say you use it or lose it and while I was kick ass at math in HS I haven't really needed it since so the skills have long since disappeared. I tried checking out my oldest boy's college trig book and frankly it might as well been in German for all I could keep up, I just haven't used advanced math in too damned long for my old butt to pull it off anymore.
As for my oldest he is gonna be wrapped up in designing his games, he is so fucking pissed at every survival horror becoming a CoD ripoff that he wants to redefine the genre by making both a SP and co-op MP game that will be pants wettingly scary, one that ramps up the terror and then throws your back against the wall and keep you pushed to the limit. who knows it might be a hit, the kid knows horror like the back of his hand and there does seem to be a serious niche going unfilled for a true survival horror that cares about scares more than set pieces, but he'll be too busy with that to help his old uncle with music stuff.
And trust me I know ALL ABOUT rehab, I spent my last year of HS in a bed because i faceplanted at 60MPH+ onto the pavement wearing nothing but a pair of PE shorts. Know the scars that Joker had in Dark Knight? Picture what those look like when they were fresh and you had what i looked like, it took over 4 hours and 80 stitches to put my face back together and another 4 hours for them to pick all the bits of street embedded in my body out. It was a good 2 and a half years of hell to get back on my feet and to this day i still can't grow a full beard or a proper goatee (it looks like I have a goatee but IRL its a Fu Manchu mustache grown long enough to connect up with the beard so the scars are covered) but you just gotta push through. One of my fingers on my left hand is permanently bent because the docs told me "you got a choice, it can be stuck straight or it can be stuck bent but the joint is so damaged that short or replacing the joint and holding it together with pins its gonna end up stuck" and I knew that I wouldn't be able to play bass with it stuck straight so I chose to have it bent instead. At the end of the day you do what you gotta do, not really any choice unless you consider laying down and dying a choice which i don't.
And finally on genetics, sure you have to have the drive to do the work and get great but if you aren't born with the right tools you'll only be able to get to a certain point and that is it. Luckily in music it doesn't matter as truly great songs have been written that are beyond simple to play but I fully accept that if I played 20 hours a day I'd never be able to do some of the things Geddly and Sheenan do simply because they have a longer reach. Its like how scientists can tell you whether you'll be a marathon runner or a sprinter by simply seeing which muscles you have, the long distance runners have muscles that don't build up lactic acid like most folks do while sprinters have muscles that burn fuel like crazy which quickly builds the lactic acid (thus making them worthless for distance) but gives them an advantage in sprints. I remember an interview with Van Halen where they asked Eddie if he could have anything what it would be and he said "an extra finger on my left hand" because even he had things he couldn't do
Uhhh you DO realize that consumer SSDs have been selling for around $80 for a 120GB drive, yes? So your drive is literally over 500% MORE EXPENSIVE and again makes comparison pointless as the vast majority aren't gonna pay more than the cost of a PC just for a very space limited SSD. Hell you can get a 256GB consumer SSD for less than half what you are paying for 100GB and my AMD 6 core with 8GB of RAM and 3TB of HDD space cost less than just your SSD alone.
So I'm sorry but enterprise drives aren't in the same ballpark, they aren't even the same sport. I'll just advocate to my customers to get caching drives (average price $40 for 32GB) and that way they wouldn't risk their data while gaining many of the benefits of SSD.
I'm sorry Ms AC but not only are you full of shit but you can't even read before posting. I said VERY CLEARLY that "Intel was one of 5 VENDORS and that the other vendors had NO FLOATING POINT which Quake relied heavily upon" so what do you write? "My INTEL CPUS ran it just fine!"
Well no shit retard, the whole selling point of Intel was FLOATING POINT which is also why their chips cost more, because you had the X87 FP units and X86 main CPU until Pentium came and combined them. Try reading before posting otherwise you just look like an idiot. Oh and its called "PR rating" look it up. They ALL used PR rating back then and it was based on the P1 so they were all called "P1" based on rating. Cryix had a P1 rating of 66MHz-125MHz, AMD had a P1 rating up to 300MHz, it was all based on PR rating.
And whose fault is that? Microsoft was limited by anti-trust and wouldn't be allowed to add what today many would consider common sense features, for example MSFT had to deal with numerous lawsuits just to be allowed to have the EXTREMELY limited Windows defender.
While MSFT has made incredibly DUMB moves the past few years you can't really compare what they did under the antitrust restrictions with what Apple and Google were able to do without. Frankly considering how Apple has been able to alter the course of web development Apple could use a little antitrust themselves but even though I think they are abusing their position I would never ever advocate for ANY company to be as badly hamstrung as MSFT was under antitrust, they should be broken up long before it gets to that point.
The problem is consumer electronics are frankly half assed and flaky so you are more likely to run into problems if you are hooking anything but PCs to the router. this is the same reason why we have to have UPNP, because many home devices simply won't run without them on and I've found with MAC filtering enabled some smartphones and tablets simply refuse to connect without going through an act of congress.
Frankly we need to throw the whole damned thing out and start over, design something that low power devices like smartphones and tablets can use easily while at the same time having very tough to crack security. maybe placing a hardware crypto chip on the device?
all I know if primarily dealing with home users you'd be amazed at how much consumer devices start getting flaky the more you ramp up the security, its like the manufacturers just expected everybody to run with least security possible and that is all they tested for.
Yeah and how many orders of magnitude more expensive are those compared to the consumer gear? To use a/. car analogy it'd be like saying "the new econo cars come with lousy service" and you chime in "but my Ferrari gets same day service!" which if nice for those that can afford Ferrari but does nothing to change the original statement.
The problem is from what I've seen the new consumer MLCs are just junk, nobody has really figured out how to keep the controllers from dying on them. Until they do the most I'll get is a hybrid or maybe a caching drive so when it fails I wouldn't be risking any data.
Frankly what we need is another super tweet, cheap, small, and able to carry plenty of firepower and with long loiter. And if you have ever seen the pics the Warhogs can take just insane amounts of punishment and keep on flying but you are right that it would probably be cheaper to build something around the Texan and then supplement it with the AC130 for when you need the heavy ground pound.
But frankly we are still acting like its the cold war, we are building all these stealth based techno turkeys and we have seen time and time again that to have stealth you have to pretty much cripple the aircraft's ability to fight. I mean how many Sidewinders can the F-35 carry in that little internal bay...2? You send in the f-35 and it'll quickly be just twiddling its thumbs because with stealth requiring everything be mounted internally the firepower just isn't there.
At the end of the day we are gonna end up with more "pilots in name only" because our aging fleet is wearing out and the F-35 like the F-22 costs too damned much to make it our only plane so our pilots are gonna end up having to take turns just to get into the air! Between that and our building carriers like it was WWII which thanks to sea skimmers would just end up a chance for enemy target practice I honestly don't have much confidence in the way our air force is shaping up. I would argue the only reason it hasn't bit us in the ass already is we have only been going to war against frankly primitive enemies, if we ever have to face off with an enemy that doesn't live in caves we'll be SOL.
Then the USPTO would lose the money they get paid for re-examinations which IIRC is the source of a good portion of their operating budget. This of course only encourages the examiners to pass bad patents as they'll be more likely to be called into question and thus be re-examined.
You are being funny but the sad fact is the F-35 is yet another techno turkey like the F-22, and it'll spend more time on the ground than it will in the air. It also is so damned expensive we'll never be able to afford to replace our aging fleets with these super expensive techno turkeys so we really are gonna be at a disadvantage when you can flyaway a SU27 for less than 40 mil and a MiG29 for less than 60 mil.
We need to kill the techno turkeys, kill the Ford carrier or at the very least make it the last one we build for a couple decades (we have 11 the next largest possible threat country has ZERO so its beyond overkill and into total fucking waste by now) and as the Israelis have shown the F-Teen series are still seriously ass kicking planes and you can buy several F-15s or F-16s for the price of just one techno turkey Hell if you want Stealth they already have plans for a Stealth Eagle that will lower the radar footprint by something like 80% while still having longer range and better firepower than an F-35.
We are making the same mistakes the Germans made in WWII, expecting a handful of "super planes" to do ALL the work and as the Germans found out what you get IRL is planes that spend more time being worked on than they do in the air and the cost makes losing even one plane seriously hurt. Its obvious to anybody with a brain that any future wars with technologically equal enemys will be facing off against Russian and Chinese planes and their much lower costs mean they can spam us out of the sky. When you figure in the fact that the Chinese have developed sea skimmer missiles that can turn a carrier group into scrap without ever getting into range of the F-35 its pretty obvious are current plans only enrich the defense contractors, they don't do shit about keeping our Air Force flying.
Cancel the F-35, build teen series, check into how much it would cost to build more Warthogs as we have seen those are worth their weight in gold against terrorist enemies, and then you'll have a plan that will carry America into the future. If we ever face off against anybody but goat herders we are gonna end up in serious trouble, we have bet the farm on techno turkeys that have yet to show they are anything but money pits.
Yeah I quickly learned that in all the pro sports you are either born with it or you are not. I had a friend where 4 out of his 5 siblings went on to be pro or semi-pro (he would have too but blew his knee out playing college football) and one day when his folks and mine were sittin g there watching us play HS baseball I came right out and asked "How did you end up with so many pro athletes in one family?" and his dad looked at me like it was the most obvious thing in the world and said "I chose my wife based on athletic ability PERIOD. I chose a woman that was at least as good if not better than me in every sport because i knew our kids would be incredible" and he was right, 5 out of 6 went on to scholarships and pro or semi-pro careers and now most are teaching sports.
This is why it'll never bother me if somebody is "better" than I am on the bass, because there are some that simply have genetic advantages over me.; I got to play the bass player from Cinderella's 12 string once, I was picking up some strings before the concert and he was there having his basses restrung and shopping. When I asked "How in the world can you play a neck that wide?" he said "Easy, like this" and I swear his fingers were so long they wrapped completely around that neck which was nearly as wide as 3 necks put together! This is why Geddy can do a run that starts on the second fret and lands on the twelve in less than four seconds, his fingers are so long he barely has to move his hand to pull that run off, whereas with my stubby fingers I have to do a large slide just to reach the notes. So there will always be guys with longer fingers and better reaches but unlike in sports I can still compete because if you can write a catchy groove that counts for a lot more than technical ability. Look at Vai or Malmsteen, they can smoke most players but their songs sound like guitar lessons and thus don't get people pumped whereas if you put on Electric Eye or Wheels of Fire (if you haven't heard that check it out, it pumps as good as classic Priest) the next thing you know everybody is bouncing and you are doing 90 in a 55 LOL, you just can't help getting into the groove.
As for why nobody has done it? Simple nobody gives us bass players any love LOL. A good 85% of the gear out there is made for guitarists ONLY and we bass players have to make do with the scraps which is why I said you could make some damned good money. if you were to target bass players you could easily become the Fender of bass gear, nobody really targets to bass players. Think we bass players don't like wild looking basses or cool sounding effects? of course we do but nobody caters to us at an affordable price. The few that make cool looking basses and gear frankly charge assraping prices for them and its really not fair, with today's ARM DSPs it doesn't cost any more to target the bass freqs than it does guitar freqs but nobody does it. as I said there are a LOT of opportunities to target the DIY crowd and the bass players but nobody is really targeting that market so its pretty much wide open. What we really need is a digital following compressor to even out the tone, maybe the same in an EQ to even out string response, and a good bass overdrive that is volume sensitive so when you play hard it kicks in but when you back off it cleans up. Guitarists have had that for years with tube amps but tubes on bass sucks as it adds too much noise so a good digital with noise suppression would sell like mad.
Anyway back to the grind, hope you have a great week..peace.
Oh you didn't double post, you TRIPLE posted, congrats. But that doesn't actually change a thing as again Quake was the Crysis of its day and on release frankly most PCs just couldn't run it well. i wouldn't be surprised if the first 3D cards were used more for taking some of the load off the practically melting CPU than for 3D, and yes i know GLQuake came out later but that doesn't change the fact that Quake had fully 3D characters which without a card seriously pimpslapped the shit out of the systems in their day.
Also remember that Intel was one of only IIRC 5 vendors and frankly wasn't even the most popular and most of those other chips? Couldn't run Quake AT ALL without some sort of assistance. The reason being that Quake was floating point heavy and most of the chips back then didn't have floating point support As I said I ended up with a 100MHz PC back then for less than $100 (IIRC it was either an AMD or a Cyrix) simply because it couldn't play Quake and Hexen. those two games were THE games to play at the time and frankly most systems wouldn't run them at more than 10FPS until 3D cards came along to share the load.
They can tout that all they want, they did the same with Vista, remember? It still didn't keep MSFT from having to let the OEMs sell XP while they went back to the drawing board, which should be our goal with Win 8. Make MSFT hear the people that have spoken that Win 8 is a giant DO NOT WANT, let the OEMs have Win 7 back, and start over with something that doesn't treat the desktop as a supergigantic smartphone.
When I say "graphics card" I assumed since we were talking about 3D gaming everyone would understand I meant a 3D accelerating graphics card or chip, even the lowest intel chip does several orders of magnitude more than what the chipsets back then did.
And did you ever try running Quake on a 486 with no 3D chip? yeah sure it would "run" if you count sub 15FPS as "running". Unlike the Build games you had to have a pretty damned beefy PC for the time to run Quake without 3D and even with 3D it was quite the piggy, the Crysis of its day. I remember getting a nice 100MHz P1 because it wouldn't run quake and Hexen worth a damned and the guy promptly went out and spent over a grand on the then cutting edge 233MHz with a 3D card just to play those 2 games, so I know all about what Quake could and couldn't do back in the day. That same PC played the Build games just great, which is how I ended up finding out about them as I liked to play shooters then as now.
so just because you can run Quake on a $50 cellphone now does NOT mean most could run it when it was first released, if it weren't for the Voodoo 1 frankly a lot of the PCs at the time would have never run that beyond a slideshow.
And the simple fact is its butt simple to give Windows the same functionality so ANY application that can print can give you a PDF. Simply go to Ninite and check the box for either PDFCreator or CutePDF, your choice, then run it. Tada! Now any Windows application that can print can print as PDF.
And building in a PDF reader is just dumb, either you have to cripple the hell out of it so many docs made with Adobe Reader won't format correctly or you open a big ass hole in the security thanks to how all the extra crap Adobe added to the PDF format in later years is easily pwned.
Everybody else can cheer if they want but I have a feeling the hackers are cheering just as loudly. PDF was a good idea once upon a time but to sell new versions of Acrobat Adobe just kept adding more and more shit that frankly never should have been in a portable DOCUMENT format and now its a major security risk. Does anybody know if its easily removed or at the very least disabled?
Yeah and they used to say you could throw Samsonite luggage in a cage with a gorilla and it would be fine, don't mean its true though.
From what I've seen with my gamer customers the new MLC just sucks, it really does. They don't buy no cheap shit OCZ either, we are talking Samsung, Kingston, and Intel, and frankly they all have crazy failure rates. The bitch is from what I've seen its NOT the cells that is the problem, its the controller. the controller goes out way too damned often and when it dies there goes your drive, poof. I've had to show them how to use truecrypt so they would feel comfortable with sending the drives in under warranty because frankly I haven't seen one survive past warranty. The guys over at coding horror have even come up with a name for this, they call it the hot/crazy scale because for that hot SSD performance you have to put up with crazy high failure rates.
I've seen enough failures that while I may try a hybrid I won't touch an SSD for my own systems until they get this problem fixed. in a way it reminds me of the first HDDs, they had crazy failure rates too until they got the process down pat, maybe the same will happen with SSDs.
Duke was okay but frankly IMHO it wasn't the best the Build engine had to offer. If you haven't played Blood or Redneck Rampage then you haven't seen what the Build engine could do, huge levels with tons of secrets, plenty of bad guys that would give you a good fight, and while the visuals of course couldn't match Quake you could play the Build games without a graphics card which at the time was NOT cheap.
so if anybody hasn't tried them GOG has both Bloodand Redneck Rampage and since they are running in DOSBox you can play them on just about any OS. If you really want to see what the Build engine could do those are the ones to play. besides who can't enjoy a game where you shoot a titty gun while drinking beer and listening to Mojo Nixon or go through classic horror sets like the Phantasm mortuary while spouting one liners like a cross between Clint Eastwood and Bruce Campbell?
No its not, all those shell replacements do is HIDE metro but do NOT kill it, so all that tweeting twitting FB crap is still sucking memory and bandwidth, you just can't see it. Not to mention that unlike Win 7 a good chunk of the programs in win 8 are ADWARE so you also have to figure in the time to remove that crap.
This article just confirms what any of us little shop guys could have told you, nobody wants Windows 8. There really is no point in windows 8 unless its on a cellphone or tablet and the "extra speed" is frankly just a VERY bad hack (look up "hybrid boot" to see what is actually happening, you no longer can get a clean start of Win 8 without going CLI, instead you get hybrid boot which is more like hibernate than shutdown) and Win 7 on an SSD more than makes up for it.
If for no other reason refuse to take windows 8 on principle...I mean do you REALLY want MSFT to continue in this direction? Stuffing the OS full of ads, making UIs that look like a 14 year old with ADHD went nuts with a box of crayons, not to mention trying to drive us towards an appstore?
Windows 7 is fast, its rock solid stable, and most importantly IT JUST WORKS and will keep on working until 2020 at the least, so why get stuck with something you don't want and tell MSFT its okay to ignore the users like that because you're willing to "put up with it" and try to hack your way back to a functional OS? Just say No to Metro, if enough people just say no then MSFT will have no choice but go back to the drawing board and fix their mess, just as they did with Vista.
Look up "Ulrich Drepper is an asshole" to see EXACTLY what is wrong with FOSS and the GPL model, because GPL doesn't have a "free for private use, pay for commercial use" clause so that those that get tired of the bullshit can fork and make their time/money back you end up with a billion Ulrich Dreppers. Look up the chat logs, its sad how much control the little dipshit had, people would ask for what should have been obvious, things like "We could use an ARM branch" and his "response" would be just a heap of insults, he would literally write shit like "You're an idiot, you don't know anything, piss off'. It finally got bad enough Debian paid to fork just to get away from the prick.
For Linux to work as on OS you need cooperation, you need everyone working together to fix instead of reinventing the wheel, instead you get the maladjusted like Drepper being pricks just because they can. And the worst part is without the redistribute clause, which is a boat anchor on the GPL? The printer story would STILL be fixed, he could have the code, modify the code, and share his changes without sharing the entire OS.
While practice might help you still have to be born with some serious eye/hand coordination to hit such a small target on the move. I played baseball for nearly 5 years and no matter how much I practice the poor pitcher would be squealing like a girl before the game was over, every damned time, straight for the pitcher's crotch LOL!
As for how I started playing bass? I got a guitar and kept putting bigger strings on it because "it isn't deep enough" until a friend said "What you need isn't a guitar" and handed me his brother's P-Bass. it was love at first sight, I hit that low e on that Fender half stack and the room started vibrating in time with the note and feeding back into the bass and that was it....I was hooked. But I had to play plenty of shitty gigs to get the exp and hone my chops, I was in a house band for 2 years which is like being a human jukebox, if ANYBODY in the band knows a requested song they will try it and you have to figure it out then and there, even if you have never heard of the song. This is hard but it teaches you to have "go to" patterns that will work in any key that sound good so you can cover up the fact you are really hunting for the next note LOL. A couple of years playing country behind chicken wire like the Blues Brothers (that was a hell job) that taught me how to improvise, it all comes down to just getting out there and doing it, doesn't matter if you think you are terrible to start, you lock in with that kick drum and most folks will be happy.
And I'm sorry but there ARE two kings of bass, and that is Geddy Lee of Rush and Billy Sheenan. Those two can create melodies that we ordinary men will never be able to replicate. check out "La Villa Strangiato" sometime and see what I mean. I saw the Rush documentory and there was all these famous players, guy that play 6 days a week and have made crazy money for dozens of years and they ALL said the same thing "Thought I was hot shit....until I tried to play la Villa Strangiato" and the bitch is...he's NOT showing off. Its one of the most beautiful melodies I've ever heard, its just fucking HARD. Geddy himself said he had to build the song in sections and then learn how to play it live because it was damned near beyond HIS skills, but he said "there just wasn't anything else that would work, it HAD to be that way for the song".
As far as JP goes, its not the leads that are easy, those can be insanely hard, for example Hellion/Electric Eye, but the rhythm is some of the simplest there is, its all about the "chug" and getting everyone locked in tight. This is one of the hardest things to do when you are playing bass, is its always tempting to "add" more than is needed, when sometimes you have to accept that less is more sometimes. Because when the bass and drums are locked together in perfect time you can hit the audience like a cannon blast, the kick drum just magnifies your power for a hell of a punch.
Have you ever thought about using your programming skills in the music industry? There are several products I can think of off the top of my head that a good programmer could make that would sell like hotcakes and really help a lot of the DIY crowd. For example imagine a program that scanned a track or song and pointed out which frequencies were too loud and where it was too soft so that you don't need to be an expert on EQs to get a good even mix? and any bass player will tell you we need a digital automated compressor but nobody makes one. every bass has notes that will be more loud than other notes because the wood and strings vibrate the body just right with those notes to make them spike, so a digital compressor that would track the notes and make sure it all comes out even without the "pumping" that the current compressors do (you I'm sure have heard how when some play slap/pop the bass just pops in and drops out just as quick? That is the compressor pumping) would be a slice of heaven but nobody makes one, at least not at any price that a normal person can afford. I've heard there are "smart compressors" in
But we are ALREADY seeing that thanks to electric companies gouging. I don't know a single person with a regular bulb anymore and the landlord is going to all 90 of his apts and handing out CFLs because the local electric company is gouging. Not saying gouging is in any way good but the way prices are going up across the board means more and more are using less, just like how when our gas hit $3.50 a gallon all recreational travel dies right then and there because people won't pay those prices to travel.
But if you try to do ANYTHING with carbon all you are gonna do is pull a reverse robin hood and that is because the same leeches that wrote the rules on credit default swaps have written the rules for cap and trade and any variation thereof, and because Goldman Sachs is too connected (notice the head of the fed has been a member of GS almost since the day it was born, no matter if a D or R was in the white house) any attempts to do shit about carbon ends up with GS bleeding your wallet to feed their endless profits.
To cause real change with regards to AGW you are gonna have to have real leadership and all we've had in the USA is one shill after another. Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains" and as long as those in the financial sector are allowed to write the "solution" to AGW all we will see is bullshit and cash grabs as Wall Street can't even think past a couple of quarters anymore.
Well where I live everybody reuses those plastic bags they get from the stores as trash bags for their kitchen trash cans. Since they are a lot thinner than a regular kitchen garbage bag if you were to ban then all you would do is INCREASE the amount of plastic going into the landfills. IIRC there were parts of the UK that saw similar effects.
As for the study? Too little data, correlation, yada yada yada. But I do think a smarter study would be to measure the amount of plastic used per household before and after a ban, because if all you are doing is raising the costs to regular folks and giving more customers to the kitchen garbage bag companies you really aren't doing shit to help the environment, you are just passing the buck.
This is why its better to fight cap and trade and do nothing at all than go along with it as it won't remove a single drop of pollution, it'll just give the parasites more money while shifting the pollution to Asia.
sadly things will have to get a LOT worse before we can get rid of the parasites trying to cash in in one way or another with AGW because as long as those at the top look at AGW as a reverse robin hood cash grab you can give up on any policy that would do anything about AGW, there is too much profit to be made from scams like crap and trade than in actually having policies that work.
How in the hell did you catch such a tiny ball with that little stick? hell I was called "crotch killer" when i played baseball because i kept hitting the pitcher in the balls, i sure as hell couldn't whip a ball that small and get it close enough to that little stick for anybody to catch squat LOL!
And your nephew is right and wrong at the same time. yes you DO build up calluses but if you play 4 string for a long time you get a thinner flatter callus and then when you play a 5 string, especially one with the really fat strings like I like, its gonna tear those calluses clean off which is why I'm typing sans fingertips. On most basses the top string is between 102-105mm, whereas on my 5 string its 130mm. That much wider string means much thicker windings which requires a different style of callus. after a couple weeks of playing the 5 exclusively I'll get fat round hard calluses instead of the thin slicks I had playing my acoustic 4 string.
But honestly when the music is cooking you don't even feel it. when my last band won "best band in state" the crowd was going apeshit as I was tearing into the last 5 songs and when the set was over Isaac (the singer) leaned over and said "Jesus Christ man, don't that hurt?" and I looked down and that pearl white pickguard was streaked red with blood. i have been ripping into those strings so hard it literally ripped the calluses clean off my first two fingers on my right hand. But the roar of the crowd and the rush from the music had me so high i honestly didn't even feel a sting, the rush was just too great for pain to even enter into it. The next day i used half a bottle of superglue to make a scab for the missing skin and was right back on stage that night like nothing ever happened.
But you should pick up an instrument and give it a whirl, its never too late to pick up. if you were able to whip a ball around like that playing a keyboard wouldn't be hard at all, tons of tutorials online and you can get a cheap board for a little of nothing. Or get your nephew to show you some of the basics like the box pattern on the bass, nice thing about bass is there are a ton of easy songs you can play when you are starting out, AC/DC and Judas priest bass lines are some of the simplest lines ever written but they are catchy as hell, then you can always work your way up later to the harder stuff like Rush.
Just remember NOBODY is perfect, there will ALWAYS be somebody better, hell I've been playing for nearly 30 years now and there are still some Rush songs my stubby fingers will never be able to play, YYZ or La Villa Strangiato (which is pretty much the hardest song ever recorded, i know plenty of guitarists and drummers that have also tried and failed that one) just a couple of examples. but just because there are others better doesn't mean i can't get a crowd to bouncing and THAT is ultimately what matters. When you have the crowd jumping and the music is pumping its unlike anything words can describe, its like an electric current joining you to your band and to the audience. i have actually had to watch videos of myself because we had a killer crowd and what i was playing was frankly beyond me, it was the energy from the crowd that made me better than i was.
BTW I don't know if I gave you this link or not but if not might want to forward this link to your nephew and if you want to play guitar or bass check it out yourself. these guitars and basses are cheap but good, they of course won't compare to say a $1000 Fender or even my $700 Squire but they have good tone and since they copy fender and Gibson you can customize the hell out of 'em dirt cheap. In my last band we would get cheap instruments like this to give away during raffles but these sounded good enough the guitarist ended up with half a dozen and I had one of the jazz basses for ages until i got hooked on 5 string and swapped it for a second 5 for a spare.
But I'm telling ya man you gotta try it at least once, hell if I could walk out onstage not 2
The problem is they wouldn't be able to use Linux and still keep the doors open, look at how Canonical has been reduced to begging and trying to latch onto every fad in the hopes of making a cent. If they would have had a "free for personal use, pay for commercial use" model frankly Linux would have been fixed half a decade ago and that would have even covered RMS' printer story scenario, since he could fix the code, modify the code, and share the modifications online, just not give away the whole OS.
I used to think that Canonical could have done that and had dropped the ball but now I know I was wrong, there is simply too much that needs fixing for the GPL model to work. GPL only works for the "blessed three" use cases, sell hardware, sell support/services, or holding out a tin cup. None of these will provide the good 100 million plus required to fix all the broken buggy shit like the wiFi, sound, graphics, and of course writing an ABI and forking away the kernel so I honestly think Linux is ultimately doom to failure on any job that doesn't fit the blessed three. Servers? You can sell support/services and you can sell hardware. Phones and tablets/? You are selling the hardware. see what I mean? this is why you see no AAA games that are FOSS, because despite companies giving the community powerful game engines for over a decade games don't fall under the blessed three so it will just never happen.
Ultimately if we are ever gonna get a "third way" it'll have to be based on BSD where you can actually sell the OS to make your R&D back. People point to Google but its no accident that ChromeOS ONLY works online, because Google is a datamining company and by forcing users to be online all the time they make more money by datamining the users who are NOT their customers and selling that data to their customers the advertisers. So what we need is someone who will put the users FIRST, copy what Jobs did with NeXT and take BSD and make a user friendly OS out of it.
But sadly I doubt that will ever happen and as long as Linux development is "welcome to bizarro world" you can give up on Linux ever doing squat on the desktop.
Because I pointed out the need for a "people's car" that ran on diesel so you can have better gas mileage now and the ability to use bio-diesel down the road?
But it doesn't matter how you feel about AGW because we ALL have to fight the current "solution" proposed because its a scam. If I told you I'd come clean your house for a fee and then just threw everything, garbage and all, into the closet, would you pay me? Because that is EXACTLY what cap and trade is! Gore is against ANY tariffs on China (because he and his rich friends make money there you stupid peasant you) while pretending that the fact China has already said they will NOT join any cap and trade treaties means nothing....what do YOU think is gonna happen when the cost of making anything in the USA suddenly jumps to 30 times the cost of making it in China? it doesn't take Kojack to solve this mystery, every single factory that can move WILL move. After all they will suffer ZERO penalty if they leave and suffer a crap and trade penalty if they stay, frankly they'd be retarded to stay in the USA!
Am I against climate change? Sure for the simple fact that we live in a fishbowl and dumping pollutants is stupid any way you slice it. but the whole crap and trade is a classic example of "Lets do something!" even if that something doesn't work or solve anything. If you truly want to do something about AGW you have to make polluting unprofitable for companies, so that they will take cleaner routes because its cheaper than paying the fines....simple yes? But crap and trade does NOTHING to stop any pollution, all it does is move it from one place to the other, just like me putting everything in the closet. its still there, its still not clean, its just out of sight.
But sadly that just doesn't work when you are talking about a fishbowl, that pollution isn't gonna magically stay in China, look at how we can detect their smog in CA for example. We have to have a comprehensive program to actually LOWER the amount of pollution, not shift it around, but as long as people can be suckered by crap and trade the leeches will never give it up.
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Dude I ain't coded in more than half a decade and my only coding exp was VB 6 which is as dead as Disco. For these programs to work they would need to be coded for speed and VB was a lot of things but a close to real time language it wasn't. You might be able to get the EQ analyzer written in VB but the pedals would probably have to be written in either assembly or maybe C, something that runs as close to bare metal as humanly possible to keep the tracking real time and my skills are nowhere near that. I wrote VB GUIs to local DBs for places like junkyards, not exactly the kind of work that would lend itself to writing a music app.
Besides one would have to be good at math and frankly its been too many years since I've needed more than basic math and I now suck at it. They say you use it or lose it and while I was kick ass at math in HS I haven't really needed it since so the skills have long since disappeared. I tried checking out my oldest boy's college trig book and frankly it might as well been in German for all I could keep up, I just haven't used advanced math in too damned long for my old butt to pull it off anymore.
As for my oldest he is gonna be wrapped up in designing his games, he is so fucking pissed at every survival horror becoming a CoD ripoff that he wants to redefine the genre by making both a SP and co-op MP game that will be pants wettingly scary, one that ramps up the terror and then throws your back against the wall and keep you pushed to the limit. who knows it might be a hit, the kid knows horror like the back of his hand and there does seem to be a serious niche going unfilled for a true survival horror that cares about scares more than set pieces, but he'll be too busy with that to help his old uncle with music stuff.
And trust me I know ALL ABOUT rehab, I spent my last year of HS in a bed because i faceplanted at 60MPH+ onto the pavement wearing nothing but a pair of PE shorts. Know the scars that Joker had in Dark Knight? Picture what those look like when they were fresh and you had what i looked like, it took over 4 hours and 80 stitches to put my face back together and another 4 hours for them to pick all the bits of street embedded in my body out. It was a good 2 and a half years of hell to get back on my feet and to this day i still can't grow a full beard or a proper goatee (it looks like I have a goatee but IRL its a Fu Manchu mustache grown long enough to connect up with the beard so the scars are covered) but you just gotta push through. One of my fingers on my left hand is permanently bent because the docs told me "you got a choice, it can be stuck straight or it can be stuck bent but the joint is so damaged that short or replacing the joint and holding it together with pins its gonna end up stuck" and I knew that I wouldn't be able to play bass with it stuck straight so I chose to have it bent instead. At the end of the day you do what you gotta do, not really any choice unless you consider laying down and dying a choice which i don't.
And finally on genetics, sure you have to have the drive to do the work and get great but if you aren't born with the right tools you'll only be able to get to a certain point and that is it. Luckily in music it doesn't matter as truly great songs have been written that are beyond simple to play but I fully accept that if I played 20 hours a day I'd never be able to do some of the things Geddly and Sheenan do simply because they have a longer reach. Its like how scientists can tell you whether you'll be a marathon runner or a sprinter by simply seeing which muscles you have, the long distance runners have muscles that don't build up lactic acid like most folks do while sprinters have muscles that burn fuel like crazy which quickly builds the lactic acid (thus making them worthless for distance) but gives them an advantage in sprints. I remember an interview with Van Halen where they asked Eddie if he could have anything what it would be and he said "an extra finger on my left hand" because even he had things he couldn't do
Uhhh you DO realize that consumer SSDs have been selling for around $80 for a 120GB drive, yes? So your drive is literally over 500% MORE EXPENSIVE and again makes comparison pointless as the vast majority aren't gonna pay more than the cost of a PC just for a very space limited SSD. Hell you can get a 256GB consumer SSD for less than half what you are paying for 100GB and my AMD 6 core with 8GB of RAM and 3TB of HDD space cost less than just your SSD alone.
So I'm sorry but enterprise drives aren't in the same ballpark, they aren't even the same sport. I'll just advocate to my customers to get caching drives (average price $40 for 32GB) and that way they wouldn't risk their data while gaining many of the benefits of SSD.
I'm sorry Ms AC but not only are you full of shit but you can't even read before posting. I said VERY CLEARLY that "Intel was one of 5 VENDORS and that the other vendors had NO FLOATING POINT which Quake relied heavily upon" so what do you write? "My INTEL CPUS ran it just fine!"
Well no shit retard, the whole selling point of Intel was FLOATING POINT which is also why their chips cost more, because you had the X87 FP units and X86 main CPU until Pentium came and combined them. Try reading before posting otherwise you just look like an idiot. Oh and its called "PR rating" look it up. They ALL used PR rating back then and it was based on the P1 so they were all called "P1" based on rating. Cryix had a P1 rating of 66MHz-125MHz, AMD had a P1 rating up to 300MHz, it was all based on PR rating.
And whose fault is that? Microsoft was limited by anti-trust and wouldn't be allowed to add what today many would consider common sense features, for example MSFT had to deal with numerous lawsuits just to be allowed to have the EXTREMELY limited Windows defender.
While MSFT has made incredibly DUMB moves the past few years you can't really compare what they did under the antitrust restrictions with what Apple and Google were able to do without. Frankly considering how Apple has been able to alter the course of web development Apple could use a little antitrust themselves but even though I think they are abusing their position I would never ever advocate for ANY company to be as badly hamstrung as MSFT was under antitrust, they should be broken up long before it gets to that point.
The problem is consumer electronics are frankly half assed and flaky so you are more likely to run into problems if you are hooking anything but PCs to the router. this is the same reason why we have to have UPNP, because many home devices simply won't run without them on and I've found with MAC filtering enabled some smartphones and tablets simply refuse to connect without going through an act of congress.
Frankly we need to throw the whole damned thing out and start over, design something that low power devices like smartphones and tablets can use easily while at the same time having very tough to crack security. maybe placing a hardware crypto chip on the device?
all I know if primarily dealing with home users you'd be amazed at how much consumer devices start getting flaky the more you ramp up the security, its like the manufacturers just expected everybody to run with least security possible and that is all they tested for.
Yeah and how many orders of magnitude more expensive are those compared to the consumer gear? To use a /. car analogy it'd be like saying "the new econo cars come with lousy service" and you chime in "but my Ferrari gets same day service!" which if nice for those that can afford Ferrari but does nothing to change the original statement.
The problem is from what I've seen the new consumer MLCs are just junk, nobody has really figured out how to keep the controllers from dying on them. Until they do the most I'll get is a hybrid or maybe a caching drive so when it fails I wouldn't be risking any data.
Frankly what we need is another super tweet, cheap, small, and able to carry plenty of firepower and with long loiter. And if you have ever seen the pics the Warhogs can take just insane amounts of punishment and keep on flying but you are right that it would probably be cheaper to build something around the Texan and then supplement it with the AC130 for when you need the heavy ground pound.
But frankly we are still acting like its the cold war, we are building all these stealth based techno turkeys and we have seen time and time again that to have stealth you have to pretty much cripple the aircraft's ability to fight. I mean how many Sidewinders can the F-35 carry in that little internal bay...2? You send in the f-35 and it'll quickly be just twiddling its thumbs because with stealth requiring everything be mounted internally the firepower just isn't there.
At the end of the day we are gonna end up with more "pilots in name only" because our aging fleet is wearing out and the F-35 like the F-22 costs too damned much to make it our only plane so our pilots are gonna end up having to take turns just to get into the air! Between that and our building carriers like it was WWII which thanks to sea skimmers would just end up a chance for enemy target practice I honestly don't have much confidence in the way our air force is shaping up. I would argue the only reason it hasn't bit us in the ass already is we have only been going to war against frankly primitive enemies, if we ever have to face off with an enemy that doesn't live in caves we'll be SOL.
Then the USPTO would lose the money they get paid for re-examinations which IIRC is the source of a good portion of their operating budget. This of course only encourages the examiners to pass bad patents as they'll be more likely to be called into question and thus be re-examined.
You are being funny but the sad fact is the F-35 is yet another techno turkey like the F-22, and it'll spend more time on the ground than it will in the air. It also is so damned expensive we'll never be able to afford to replace our aging fleets with these super expensive techno turkeys so we really are gonna be at a disadvantage when you can flyaway a SU27 for less than 40 mil and a MiG29 for less than 60 mil.
We need to kill the techno turkeys, kill the Ford carrier or at the very least make it the last one we build for a couple decades (we have 11 the next largest possible threat country has ZERO so its beyond overkill and into total fucking waste by now) and as the Israelis have shown the F-Teen series are still seriously ass kicking planes and you can buy several F-15s or F-16s for the price of just one techno turkey Hell if you want Stealth they already have plans for a Stealth Eagle that will lower the radar footprint by something like 80% while still having longer range and better firepower than an F-35.
We are making the same mistakes the Germans made in WWII, expecting a handful of "super planes" to do ALL the work and as the Germans found out what you get IRL is planes that spend more time being worked on than they do in the air and the cost makes losing even one plane seriously hurt. Its obvious to anybody with a brain that any future wars with technologically equal enemys will be facing off against Russian and Chinese planes and their much lower costs mean they can spam us out of the sky. When you figure in the fact that the Chinese have developed sea skimmer missiles that can turn a carrier group into scrap without ever getting into range of the F-35 its pretty obvious are current plans only enrich the defense contractors, they don't do shit about keeping our Air Force flying.
Cancel the F-35, build teen series, check into how much it would cost to build more Warthogs as we have seen those are worth their weight in gold against terrorist enemies, and then you'll have a plan that will carry America into the future. If we ever face off against anybody but goat herders we are gonna end up in serious trouble, we have bet the farm on techno turkeys that have yet to show they are anything but money pits.
Yeah I quickly learned that in all the pro sports you are either born with it or you are not. I had a friend where 4 out of his 5 siblings went on to be pro or semi-pro (he would have too but blew his knee out playing college football) and one day when his folks and mine were sittin g there watching us play HS baseball I came right out and asked "How did you end up with so many pro athletes in one family?" and his dad looked at me like it was the most obvious thing in the world and said "I chose my wife based on athletic ability PERIOD. I chose a woman that was at least as good if not better than me in every sport because i knew our kids would be incredible" and he was right, 5 out of 6 went on to scholarships and pro or semi-pro careers and now most are teaching sports.
This is why it'll never bother me if somebody is "better" than I am on the bass, because there are some that simply have genetic advantages over me.; I got to play the bass player from Cinderella's 12 string once, I was picking up some strings before the concert and he was there having his basses restrung and shopping. When I asked "How in the world can you play a neck that wide?" he said "Easy, like this" and I swear his fingers were so long they wrapped completely around that neck which was nearly as wide as 3 necks put together! This is why Geddy can do a run that starts on the second fret and lands on the twelve in less than four seconds, his fingers are so long he barely has to move his hand to pull that run off, whereas with my stubby fingers I have to do a large slide just to reach the notes. So there will always be guys with longer fingers and better reaches but unlike in sports I can still compete because if you can write a catchy groove that counts for a lot more than technical ability. Look at Vai or Malmsteen, they can smoke most players but their songs sound like guitar lessons and thus don't get people pumped whereas if you put on Electric Eye or Wheels of Fire (if you haven't heard that check it out, it pumps as good as classic Priest) the next thing you know everybody is bouncing and you are doing 90 in a 55 LOL, you just can't help getting into the groove.
As for why nobody has done it? Simple nobody gives us bass players any love LOL. A good 85% of the gear out there is made for guitarists ONLY and we bass players have to make do with the scraps which is why I said you could make some damned good money. if you were to target bass players you could easily become the Fender of bass gear, nobody really targets to bass players. Think we bass players don't like wild looking basses or cool sounding effects? of course we do but nobody caters to us at an affordable price. The few that make cool looking basses and gear frankly charge assraping prices for them and its really not fair, with today's ARM DSPs it doesn't cost any more to target the bass freqs than it does guitar freqs but nobody does it. as I said there are a LOT of opportunities to target the DIY crowd and the bass players but nobody is really targeting that market so its pretty much wide open. What we really need is a digital following compressor to even out the tone, maybe the same in an EQ to even out string response, and a good bass overdrive that is volume sensitive so when you play hard it kicks in but when you back off it cleans up. Guitarists have had that for years with tube amps but tubes on bass sucks as it adds too much noise so a good digital with noise suppression would sell like mad.
Anyway back to the grind, hope you have a great week..peace.
Oh you didn't double post, you TRIPLE posted, congrats. But that doesn't actually change a thing as again Quake was the Crysis of its day and on release frankly most PCs just couldn't run it well. i wouldn't be surprised if the first 3D cards were used more for taking some of the load off the practically melting CPU than for 3D, and yes i know GLQuake came out later but that doesn't change the fact that Quake had fully 3D characters which without a card seriously pimpslapped the shit out of the systems in their day.
Also remember that Intel was one of only IIRC 5 vendors and frankly wasn't even the most popular and most of those other chips? Couldn't run Quake AT ALL without some sort of assistance. The reason being that Quake was floating point heavy and most of the chips back then didn't have floating point support As I said I ended up with a 100MHz PC back then for less than $100 (IIRC it was either an AMD or a Cyrix) simply because it couldn't play Quake and Hexen. those two games were THE games to play at the time and frankly most systems wouldn't run them at more than 10FPS until 3D cards came along to share the load.
They can tout that all they want, they did the same with Vista, remember? It still didn't keep MSFT from having to let the OEMs sell XP while they went back to the drawing board, which should be our goal with Win 8. Make MSFT hear the people that have spoken that Win 8 is a giant DO NOT WANT, let the OEMs have Win 7 back, and start over with something that doesn't treat the desktop as a supergigantic smartphone.
When I say "graphics card" I assumed since we were talking about 3D gaming everyone would understand I meant a 3D accelerating graphics card or chip, even the lowest intel chip does several orders of magnitude more than what the chipsets back then did.
And did you ever try running Quake on a 486 with no 3D chip? yeah sure it would "run" if you count sub 15FPS as "running". Unlike the Build games you had to have a pretty damned beefy PC for the time to run Quake without 3D and even with 3D it was quite the piggy, the Crysis of its day. I remember getting a nice 100MHz P1 because it wouldn't run quake and Hexen worth a damned and the guy promptly went out and spent over a grand on the then cutting edge 233MHz with a 3D card just to play those 2 games, so I know all about what Quake could and couldn't do back in the day. That same PC played the Build games just great, which is how I ended up finding out about them as I liked to play shooters then as now.
so just because you can run Quake on a $50 cellphone now does NOT mean most could run it when it was first released, if it weren't for the Voodoo 1 frankly a lot of the PCs at the time would have never run that beyond a slideshow.
And the simple fact is its butt simple to give Windows the same functionality so ANY application that can print can give you a PDF. Simply go to Ninite and check the box for either PDFCreator or CutePDF, your choice, then run it. Tada! Now any Windows application that can print can print as PDF.
And building in a PDF reader is just dumb, either you have to cripple the hell out of it so many docs made with Adobe Reader won't format correctly or you open a big ass hole in the security thanks to how all the extra crap Adobe added to the PDF format in later years is easily pwned.
Everybody else can cheer if they want but I have a feeling the hackers are cheering just as loudly. PDF was a good idea once upon a time but to sell new versions of Acrobat Adobe just kept adding more and more shit that frankly never should have been in a portable DOCUMENT format and now its a major security risk. Does anybody know if its easily removed or at the very least disabled?
Yeah and they used to say you could throw Samsonite luggage in a cage with a gorilla and it would be fine, don't mean its true though.
From what I've seen with my gamer customers the new MLC just sucks, it really does. They don't buy no cheap shit OCZ either, we are talking Samsung, Kingston, and Intel, and frankly they all have crazy failure rates. The bitch is from what I've seen its NOT the cells that is the problem, its the controller. the controller goes out way too damned often and when it dies there goes your drive, poof. I've had to show them how to use truecrypt so they would feel comfortable with sending the drives in under warranty because frankly I haven't seen one survive past warranty. The guys over at coding horror have even come up with a name for this, they call it the hot/crazy scale because for that hot SSD performance you have to put up with crazy high failure rates.
I've seen enough failures that while I may try a hybrid I won't touch an SSD for my own systems until they get this problem fixed. in a way it reminds me of the first HDDs, they had crazy failure rates too until they got the process down pat, maybe the same will happen with SSDs.
Duke was okay but frankly IMHO it wasn't the best the Build engine had to offer. If you haven't played Blood or Redneck Rampage then you haven't seen what the Build engine could do, huge levels with tons of secrets, plenty of bad guys that would give you a good fight, and while the visuals of course couldn't match Quake you could play the Build games without a graphics card which at the time was NOT cheap.
so if anybody hasn't tried them GOG has both Blood and Redneck Rampage and since they are running in DOSBox you can play them on just about any OS. If you really want to see what the Build engine could do those are the ones to play. besides who can't enjoy a game where you shoot a titty gun while drinking beer and listening to Mojo Nixon or go through classic horror sets like the Phantasm mortuary while spouting one liners like a cross between Clint Eastwood and Bruce Campbell?
No its not, all those shell replacements do is HIDE metro but do NOT kill it, so all that tweeting twitting FB crap is still sucking memory and bandwidth, you just can't see it. Not to mention that unlike Win 7 a good chunk of the programs in win 8 are ADWARE so you also have to figure in the time to remove that crap.
This article just confirms what any of us little shop guys could have told you, nobody wants Windows 8. There really is no point in windows 8 unless its on a cellphone or tablet and the "extra speed" is frankly just a VERY bad hack (look up "hybrid boot" to see what is actually happening, you no longer can get a clean start of Win 8 without going CLI, instead you get hybrid boot which is more like hibernate than shutdown) and Win 7 on an SSD more than makes up for it.
If for no other reason refuse to take windows 8 on principle...I mean do you REALLY want MSFT to continue in this direction? Stuffing the OS full of ads, making UIs that look like a 14 year old with ADHD went nuts with a box of crayons, not to mention trying to drive us towards an appstore?
Windows 7 is fast, its rock solid stable, and most importantly IT JUST WORKS and will keep on working until 2020 at the least, so why get stuck with something you don't want and tell MSFT its okay to ignore the users like that because you're willing to "put up with it" and try to hack your way back to a functional OS? Just say No to Metro, if enough people just say no then MSFT will have no choice but go back to the drawing board and fix their mess, just as they did with Vista.
Look up "Ulrich Drepper is an asshole" to see EXACTLY what is wrong with FOSS and the GPL model, because GPL doesn't have a "free for private use, pay for commercial use" clause so that those that get tired of the bullshit can fork and make their time/money back you end up with a billion Ulrich Dreppers. Look up the chat logs, its sad how much control the little dipshit had, people would ask for what should have been obvious, things like "We could use an ARM branch" and his "response" would be just a heap of insults, he would literally write shit like "You're an idiot, you don't know anything, piss off'. It finally got bad enough Debian paid to fork just to get away from the prick.
For Linux to work as on OS you need cooperation, you need everyone working together to fix instead of reinventing the wheel, instead you get the maladjusted like Drepper being pricks just because they can. And the worst part is without the redistribute clause, which is a boat anchor on the GPL? The printer story would STILL be fixed, he could have the code, modify the code, and share his changes without sharing the entire OS.
While practice might help you still have to be born with some serious eye/hand coordination to hit such a small target on the move. I played baseball for nearly 5 years and no matter how much I practice the poor pitcher would be squealing like a girl before the game was over, every damned time, straight for the pitcher's crotch LOL!
As for how I started playing bass? I got a guitar and kept putting bigger strings on it because "it isn't deep enough" until a friend said "What you need isn't a guitar" and handed me his brother's P-Bass. it was love at first sight, I hit that low e on that Fender half stack and the room started vibrating in time with the note and feeding back into the bass and that was it....I was hooked. But I had to play plenty of shitty gigs to get the exp and hone my chops, I was in a house band for 2 years which is like being a human jukebox, if ANYBODY in the band knows a requested song they will try it and you have to figure it out then and there, even if you have never heard of the song. This is hard but it teaches you to have "go to" patterns that will work in any key that sound good so you can cover up the fact you are really hunting for the next note LOL. A couple of years playing country behind chicken wire like the Blues Brothers (that was a hell job) that taught me how to improvise, it all comes down to just getting out there and doing it, doesn't matter if you think you are terrible to start, you lock in with that kick drum and most folks will be happy.
And I'm sorry but there ARE two kings of bass, and that is Geddy Lee of Rush and Billy Sheenan. Those two can create melodies that we ordinary men will never be able to replicate. check out "La Villa Strangiato" sometime and see what I mean. I saw the Rush documentory and there was all these famous players, guy that play 6 days a week and have made crazy money for dozens of years and they ALL said the same thing "Thought I was hot shit....until I tried to play la Villa Strangiato" and the bitch is...he's NOT showing off. Its one of the most beautiful melodies I've ever heard, its just fucking HARD. Geddy himself said he had to build the song in sections and then learn how to play it live because it was damned near beyond HIS skills, but he said "there just wasn't anything else that would work, it HAD to be that way for the song".
As far as JP goes, its not the leads that are easy, those can be insanely hard, for example Hellion/Electric Eye, but the rhythm is some of the simplest there is, its all about the "chug" and getting everyone locked in tight. This is one of the hardest things to do when you are playing bass, is its always tempting to "add" more than is needed, when sometimes you have to accept that less is more sometimes. Because when the bass and drums are locked together in perfect time you can hit the audience like a cannon blast, the kick drum just magnifies your power for a hell of a punch.
Have you ever thought about using your programming skills in the music industry? There are several products I can think of off the top of my head that a good programmer could make that would sell like hotcakes and really help a lot of the DIY crowd. For example imagine a program that scanned a track or song and pointed out which frequencies were too loud and where it was too soft so that you don't need to be an expert on EQs to get a good even mix? and any bass player will tell you we need a digital automated compressor but nobody makes one. every bass has notes that will be more loud than other notes because the wood and strings vibrate the body just right with those notes to make them spike, so a digital compressor that would track the notes and make sure it all comes out even without the "pumping" that the current compressors do (you I'm sure have heard how when some play slap/pop the bass just pops in and drops out just as quick? That is the compressor pumping) would be a slice of heaven but nobody makes one, at least not at any price that a normal person can afford. I've heard there are "smart compressors" in
But we are ALREADY seeing that thanks to electric companies gouging. I don't know a single person with a regular bulb anymore and the landlord is going to all 90 of his apts and handing out CFLs because the local electric company is gouging. Not saying gouging is in any way good but the way prices are going up across the board means more and more are using less, just like how when our gas hit $3.50 a gallon all recreational travel dies right then and there because people won't pay those prices to travel.
But if you try to do ANYTHING with carbon all you are gonna do is pull a reverse robin hood and that is because the same leeches that wrote the rules on credit default swaps have written the rules for cap and trade and any variation thereof, and because Goldman Sachs is too connected (notice the head of the fed has been a member of GS almost since the day it was born, no matter if a D or R was in the white house) any attempts to do shit about carbon ends up with GS bleeding your wallet to feed their endless profits.
To cause real change with regards to AGW you are gonna have to have real leadership and all we've had in the USA is one shill after another. Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains" and as long as those in the financial sector are allowed to write the "solution" to AGW all we will see is bullshit and cash grabs as Wall Street can't even think past a couple of quarters anymore.
Well where I live everybody reuses those plastic bags they get from the stores as trash bags for their kitchen trash cans. Since they are a lot thinner than a regular kitchen garbage bag if you were to ban then all you would do is INCREASE the amount of plastic going into the landfills. IIRC there were parts of the UK that saw similar effects.
As for the study? Too little data, correlation, yada yada yada. But I do think a smarter study would be to measure the amount of plastic used per household before and after a ban, because if all you are doing is raising the costs to regular folks and giving more customers to the kitchen garbage bag companies you really aren't doing shit to help the environment, you are just passing the buck.
This is why its better to fight cap and trade and do nothing at all than go along with it as it won't remove a single drop of pollution, it'll just give the parasites more money while shifting the pollution to Asia.
sadly things will have to get a LOT worse before we can get rid of the parasites trying to cash in in one way or another with AGW because as long as those at the top look at AGW as a reverse robin hood cash grab you can give up on any policy that would do anything about AGW, there is too much profit to be made from scams like crap and trade than in actually having policies that work.
How in the hell did you catch such a tiny ball with that little stick? hell I was called "crotch killer" when i played baseball because i kept hitting the pitcher in the balls, i sure as hell couldn't whip a ball that small and get it close enough to that little stick for anybody to catch squat LOL!
And your nephew is right and wrong at the same time. yes you DO build up calluses but if you play 4 string for a long time you get a thinner flatter callus and then when you play a 5 string, especially one with the really fat strings like I like, its gonna tear those calluses clean off which is why I'm typing sans fingertips. On most basses the top string is between 102-105mm, whereas on my 5 string its 130mm. That much wider string means much thicker windings which requires a different style of callus. after a couple weeks of playing the 5 exclusively I'll get fat round hard calluses instead of the thin slicks I had playing my acoustic 4 string.
But honestly when the music is cooking you don't even feel it. when my last band won "best band in state" the crowd was going apeshit as I was tearing into the last 5 songs and when the set was over Isaac (the singer) leaned over and said "Jesus Christ man, don't that hurt?" and I looked down and that pearl white pickguard was streaked red with blood. i have been ripping into those strings so hard it literally ripped the calluses clean off my first two fingers on my right hand. But the roar of the crowd and the rush from the music had me so high i honestly didn't even feel a sting, the rush was just too great for pain to even enter into it. The next day i used half a bottle of superglue to make a scab for the missing skin and was right back on stage that night like nothing ever happened.
But you should pick up an instrument and give it a whirl, its never too late to pick up. if you were able to whip a ball around like that playing a keyboard wouldn't be hard at all, tons of tutorials online and you can get a cheap board for a little of nothing. Or get your nephew to show you some of the basics like the box pattern on the bass, nice thing about bass is there are a ton of easy songs you can play when you are starting out, AC/DC and Judas priest bass lines are some of the simplest lines ever written but they are catchy as hell, then you can always work your way up later to the harder stuff like Rush.
Just remember NOBODY is perfect, there will ALWAYS be somebody better, hell I've been playing for nearly 30 years now and there are still some Rush songs my stubby fingers will never be able to play, YYZ or La Villa Strangiato (which is pretty much the hardest song ever recorded, i know plenty of guitarists and drummers that have also tried and failed that one) just a couple of examples. but just because there are others better doesn't mean i can't get a crowd to bouncing and THAT is ultimately what matters. When you have the crowd jumping and the music is pumping its unlike anything words can describe, its like an electric current joining you to your band and to the audience. i have actually had to watch videos of myself because we had a killer crowd and what i was playing was frankly beyond me, it was the energy from the crowd that made me better than i was.
BTW I don't know if I gave you this link or not but if not might want to forward this link to your nephew and if you want to play guitar or bass check it out yourself. these guitars and basses are cheap but good, they of course won't compare to say a $1000 Fender or even my $700 Squire but they have good tone and since they copy fender and Gibson you can customize the hell out of 'em dirt cheap. In my last band we would get cheap instruments like this to give away during raffles but these sounded good enough the guitarist ended up with half a dozen and I had one of the jazz basses for ages until i got hooked on 5 string and swapped it for a second 5 for a spare.
But I'm telling ya man you gotta try it at least once, hell if I could walk out onstage not 2
The problem is they wouldn't be able to use Linux and still keep the doors open, look at how Canonical has been reduced to begging and trying to latch onto every fad in the hopes of making a cent. If they would have had a "free for personal use, pay for commercial use" model frankly Linux would have been fixed half a decade ago and that would have even covered RMS' printer story scenario, since he could fix the code, modify the code, and share the modifications online, just not give away the whole OS.
I used to think that Canonical could have done that and had dropped the ball but now I know I was wrong, there is simply too much that needs fixing for the GPL model to work. GPL only works for the "blessed three" use cases, sell hardware, sell support/services, or holding out a tin cup. None of these will provide the good 100 million plus required to fix all the broken buggy shit like the wiFi, sound, graphics, and of course writing an ABI and forking away the kernel so I honestly think Linux is ultimately doom to failure on any job that doesn't fit the blessed three. Servers? You can sell support/services and you can sell hardware. Phones and tablets/? You are selling the hardware. see what I mean? this is why you see no AAA games that are FOSS, because despite companies giving the community powerful game engines for over a decade games don't fall under the blessed three so it will just never happen.
Ultimately if we are ever gonna get a "third way" it'll have to be based on BSD where you can actually sell the OS to make your R&D back. People point to Google but its no accident that ChromeOS ONLY works online, because Google is a datamining company and by forcing users to be online all the time they make more money by datamining the users who are NOT their customers and selling that data to their customers the advertisers. So what we need is someone who will put the users FIRST, copy what Jobs did with NeXT and take BSD and make a user friendly OS out of it.
But sadly I doubt that will ever happen and as long as Linux development is "welcome to bizarro world" you can give up on Linux ever doing squat on the desktop.
Because I pointed out the need for a "people's car" that ran on diesel so you can have better gas mileage now and the ability to use bio-diesel down the road?
But it doesn't matter how you feel about AGW because we ALL have to fight the current "solution" proposed because its a scam. If I told you I'd come clean your house for a fee and then just threw everything, garbage and all, into the closet, would you pay me? Because that is EXACTLY what cap and trade is! Gore is against ANY tariffs on China (because he and his rich friends make money there you stupid peasant you) while pretending that the fact China has already said they will NOT join any cap and trade treaties means nothing....what do YOU think is gonna happen when the cost of making anything in the USA suddenly jumps to 30 times the cost of making it in China? it doesn't take Kojack to solve this mystery, every single factory that can move WILL move. After all they will suffer ZERO penalty if they leave and suffer a crap and trade penalty if they stay, frankly they'd be retarded to stay in the USA!
Am I against climate change? Sure for the simple fact that we live in a fishbowl and dumping pollutants is stupid any way you slice it. but the whole crap and trade is a classic example of "Lets do something!" even if that something doesn't work or solve anything. If you truly want to do something about AGW you have to make polluting unprofitable for companies, so that they will take cleaner routes because its cheaper than paying the fines....simple yes? But crap and trade does NOTHING to stop any pollution, all it does is move it from one place to the other, just like me putting everything in the closet. its still there, its still not clean, its just out of sight.
But sadly that just doesn't work when you are talking about a fishbowl, that pollution isn't gonna magically stay in China, look at how we can detect their smog in CA for example. We have to have a comprehensive program to actually LOWER the amount of pollution, not shift it around, but as long as people can be suckered by crap and trade the leeches will never give it up.