Anyone find it coincidental that the researcher was a guy by the name of Hershey, working at the choc maker? IIRC the Mayans consumed chocolate as a savoury food, not a sweetened one; they'd use it to add flavour to meat and veg, or supplement chilies of various types (ya, I know they did mention the last part). Apparently sweetening chocolate was a later European idea. Anyone willing/able to confirm this?
Some thoughts, and Sasha-centric recommendations
on
Electronic Music 101?
·
· Score: 2
Well, nothing too sophisticated here, but the label Global Underground has put out some good work over the last three years or so; it's not been quite so fantastic of late, however.
If you want to ease yourself in, I'd suggest using a p2p client and downloading some Essential Mixes (The link goes to the BBC's Radio One dance music page). Recommendations, tracklistings and flamewars from plenty of users at the Essential Mix discussion site.
Personal favourites I would recommend:
Sasha - GU009 San Francisco
John Digweed - GU014 Hong Kong
Sasha - GU013 Ibiza (My #1 Desert Island Disc)
Sasha - Airdrawndagger - to be released 05 August, though you can probably find bootlegs over the net. My most treasured recent possession at the moment. Takes a while to get into it, but truly a great find once you're acclimatised.
Sasha & Digweed - Northern Exposure 1 & 2
Sander Kleinenberg - NuBreed 004(5?) - GU's up-and-comer label. IMHO, the best of the NuBreed series
Paul van Dyk - Vorsprung Dyk Technic - Avoid his more recent releases; they're cheesy as fuck. These disks, however, are top-notch.
Chemical Brothers - Any and all of their discs, including the Heavenly Social remixes
Way Out West - comprised of Nick Warren and Jody Westerberg (sp?). Warren's own work is also superb and consistent.
I would also suggest looking at related artists. Dance music encompasses a lot of styles, and cross-pollination goes on all the time. Massive Attack are another excellent act; all of their albums are great. One non-dance music act I love has to be Spiritualized. Though they don't really do dance music per se, they have an ethos and sensibility that matches well. Perfect morning-after music.
I've been lucky enough to see nearly all the acts listed above, and yes, they are all better live. Best of luck!
As someone who is part Japanese and spent two years over there, I'd suggest not getting too excited about this.
As the article points out the government is setting up consultation centres to handle complaints. Redress from the courts, however, is nothing like what we see in Western cultures, let alone British, Australian, New Zealand, American or Canadian courts. In Japan, court cases are long, excessively-drawn-out affairs that do not generally reduce to simple answers. In fact, I'd hypothesise that many outside legal advisers would view the Japanese system as hopelessly hidebound.
I think that the social pressures extant in Japanese society probably could develop into more effective constraints -- about the only aspects of the law that I think would be useful are the 'naming-and-shaming' ones, as bad publicity will lead to a direct and measurable loss of business.
The thing is, DoCoMo might have had better luck in controlling this earlier by :
funding an ad campaign to its business customers on the 'evils' of cellphone/Net spam
taking aggressive, direct action to cut off abusers
consulting with other phone suppliers and retailers that deal with the business community
developing informal standards directly identifying spam ('ADV' or the equivalent) earlier
harping on and on and on -- media interviews separate from the ad campaign above
If the phone companies are resorting to calling for help, they must have really lost control of the situation, as they generally don't like to take this route.
Right, this is definitely offtopic, but why is MandrakeForum *never* the first to reveal this kind of thing? I switched to Debian for different reasons, but it has always amazed me that the community site for Mdk users is seemingly the last to have this information.
Given that Mdk is an avowedly newbie-oriented distro, one would think that the company would have a clear interest in getting this out to its 'channels', to the party faithful, *first*.
but it lacked in the execution. In all honesty the Frontline special on the fall of the dotcoms, broadcast originally 24 January of this year, explained certain aspects of the current malaise much more dramatically -- and sounded like less of a history lesson to boot.
The companion website linked above has an extensive set of links and interviews. Highly recommended.
meaning not 'I know what to do with source,' but rather, 'I may not know what to do with source, but I bet I can find someone else out there who does'.
Speaking only for myself, I'd say that the knock-on effects were the only thing that decided it -- more documentation, more books, more info out there. The fact of having to pay for it was not a problem; it being absent would be.
I used to be a dotbomb manager and one of my employees loved using CF. Looked cool. Anyway, after getting laid off I figured I'd go with PHP for consulting work (no CF on Linux, you see) and I haven't looked back.
The thing that clicked for me was the fact that I could get documentation, textbooks and all the source easily with PHP. I suppose if CF is moving more to an open-source model that things might improve for Macromedia too. Who knows?
Anyway, thank you. That was very insightful and I hope the moderators recognise your comment as such (if you care about such things).
of 'We Are All Made of Stars' kicks the original into submission completely. Sorry, Mr Hall, but your latest album blows goats.
First, you decided to release the same record again. Then, you whored yourself -- and admitted as such -- by putting yourself on the cover of literally every magazine you could find. To blame people with burners is missing the point. Hell, how the hell did you get to be where you are today? Aren't you the artist who lives in downtown Manhattan with the ascetic's loft and the loaded studio and the Macintoshes?
I appreciate Moby, I think he does valuable work, but when he says, 'I'm not blaming tech-savvy people...' you have to wonder why he feels the need to rationalise in that way.
I'm not a Flash expert, and no, I wasn't complaining as such. I take your point about the OpenSWF website though, thanks.
I implied by mentioning the Ming extensions that there were/are plans to just simply write Flash using whatever other tools (on Linux/*BSD), but you're right, I should have noted that explicitly.
... but my guess is that this is nothing more than a sop to the people who would want to use/advocate/further SVG (main target) or the Ming/PHP extensions (secondary target). They're not really releasing the source to Flash. They're not really committing to making Flash-capable editors available a la FlashMX. This strikes me as really just a 'cover-yer-ass' move. Looks nice from faraway, but quite ugly up close.
The acid test should be whether or not they decide to open it up so that ordinary people can just plug in an Emacs mode and write Flash code. And how likely is that?
It's too bad, even with all the people around Slashdot that hate Flash. I don't see a lot of Windows users with SVG plug-ins... and I even know two people that work at Macromedia. Oh well...
I'm a Vancouverite: some recommendations if you make it out here: CDs are particularly cheap at A&B Sound. Head down to Stanley Park, it's a huge peninsula with North America's first- or second-largest park (can't remember if Central Park in NYC is bigger or smaller). We don't call it 'the Couve' -- that's just hokey.
It's a toonie. Not 'twoonie'.
Forget about the Internet access. Not that we don't have it (of course we do!), but it's a *holiday**.
The aquarium, which is very close to the zoo in Stanley Park, is much cooler. Really.
The dense residential area just south of Stanley Park is called the West End, and boasts the highest urban densities on the continent. Plenty of good Japanese restaurants there, particularly along Denman street.
And hey, we've got lots of great cheap bud too. Head down to Blunt Brothers on Hastings. Just please don't go on about how socialist we are. We know. And we don't care.
Used to live in the UK, and AG was the best way for me to find that fix of E-Mixes from R1. Doubly unfortunate that AG decided to pull its services today.
Of course, to people who don't care about their media, the following will not apply, but...
Just think of how much farther down the hole like-minded people will go without proper sources of music. Guess the only solution is to leave North America again.
What much of the discussion is missing ...
on
Gentoo Linux 1.2
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Is the fact that the issue is one of control, not source-v-binary. In this case you suggest, the question would be, 'Which packages are important?'
If you want a desktop, you will have different needs to desiring a server. You will want eye-candy. So who decides what the important packages are?
Policy dictates, if you use Debian. Something or other, if you use Red Hat or Mandrake. Gentoo and LFS put the control in your hands.
Doing what you suggest can be done, but the question of control then comes up. Either you trust others to know their Linux (binary), or you dig yourself and come up with the goods (source).
For me, it's Debian unstable. I don't have time to look at recompiling all the source for any machine at the moment, though I won't rule it out. And I have no problem whatsoever following what the Debian Project recommends as the results have been nearly perfect thus far.
[Welling & Thomson:] A good book, ruined by poor publishing or editing.
You summed it up better than me!
I'll say, though, that I was in the same boat: no previous experience with PHP or MySQL. Checked the errata site. Before even buying the book in the first place, I read the user reviews on Amazon. I followed W&T's advice to look at both online references, and in total, learned a lot more than just the book's material (well, OK, I felt more comfortable when I ran into problems).
To anyone looking at this subject area, do check out this book. It *is* good once you get past the first fifty pages.
Welling and Thomson's book is a good reference for those who want to get to grips with practical projects straight off the bat. It includes webmail, shopping cart, session control, and web-forum/weblog applications as a matter of course, and begins with a sturdy look at PHP first, moving to MySQL once the basics are covered.
Greenspan and Bulger's text is perhaps more traditionally concerned with constructing databases and the programming that surrounds them. Both books cover the material equally well, though I found some nuisances in the first book.
From the article: ' You never read about this kind of "security through obscurity," which can just as correctly be called "security through obsolescence." Despite this lack of publicity, it may be as effective a tactic as any other, and it can be implemented without spending a dime. '
Most people will know this, but I have to quote Jamie Zawinski: But as we all know, Linux is only free if your time has no value, and I find that my time is better spent doing things other than the endless moving-target-upgrade dance...
... which raises an interesting point: If you are spending time to do this, aren't you investing -- perhaps even wasting -- a lot of it hoping that your machine is beyond reach or unknown? Is that amount of effort really worth nothing? If someone succeeds in breaking the barrier, all that conscious thinking will have gone to waste, as the end result is still 'I have a cracked machine'. With current software, you have some recourse. It may always be true that the need for endless-upgrades will persist. I don't think this sounds like an alternative.
I could be wrong, but the knowledge and practical experience needed to try something like this looks to be of little worth to the people who'd want to do it.
Your work helped me out of a jam in using Q3 on Linux, and I remember you featured the fix on your page at one point. I don't think I got the chance to thank you properly, and am not sure if you'll read this thread again, but I just wanted to say that your work is greatly appreciated.
The latter, in pounds, not USD. So that'd be around 150 USD per tv, per year. I no longer live in the UK, so I can't (off the top of my head) give you exact figures, but I used to work in the advertising industry (yes, I was an evil marketroid once) and we had a huge bunch of tidbits to mull over.
Some interesting things I remember:
Three years ago, the total figure collected was just under 2bn pounds.
Apparently the UK used to charge a smaller fee for radio receivers.
This point above leads me to another: TV viewers in the UK essentially subsidise all of the Beeb's output, regardless of medium; there is no consumer choice as to where the tax (calling a spade a spade) goes. So your TV fees provide for radio, and TV, but also subsidise advertising and publishing costs for CDs from the Beeb's archives, magazines and newspaper promos.
While the commercial companies are generally not allowed to be completely in-your-face about 'synergy' and cross-media advertising, the BBC is exempted from this restriction. So you have the Radio Times (like TV Guide, but published by the corporation) advertising all sorts of radio and TV programmes on BBC Radio One, BBC One/Two (TV), and their digital satellite channels, as well as promoting the endless videocassettes and DVDs they produce. It's really quite disheartening.
Don't get me wrong. As I said above, I do have a strong emotional attachment to that objective Beeb reporting and its fine dramas. I just don't see how a more commercial Auntie serves the people it ostensibly has responsibility for.
Feel free to disagree and mod down if you like, but this is bollocks. It would be bad enough if , say the commercial channels -- ITV, C4, C5 or Sky -- did this. But having the Beeb do this is much, much worse.
For you non-Euro-resident readers, the BBC already collects a gigantic toll from the population at large ('the license fee'; currently UKP112 for a colour TV ) for its budget, in exchange for what is generally regarded as among the best programming anywhere. While I have supported the BBC strongly in the past, this kind of activity essentially is extremely unethical for a number of reasons:
It cannot be erased until 7 days have passed.
Viewers not recording other programmes had no choice in avoiding it.
Parental controls were seemingly ignored. Given its content fair warning in advance couldn't be too much to ask of either the Beeb or Tivo.
Claims over lowered priority and user choice notwithstanding, this advertising still takes up HD space.
Most objectionable to me personally: The BBC is subsidised by the public purse, however indirectly, and to force programming on people who have not asked for it is really taking the piss.
The BBC, through its joint ventures in the UK (particularly publishing and radio), North America and elsewhere, is already blurring the distinction between public monies (the license fee) and private finance to an unhealthy level. With this latest effort they lose a little more of their hard-earned reputation of objectivity in pursuit of coin, and more importantly, give the British public less of a reason in future to pay the fees.
Regardless of however small the payment was in the grand scheme of things, this was wrong. To think of it another way, 100% of the British television public paid for only a small subset of viewers (less than 1%?) to receive something that they probably didn't want. How is that acceptable?
Take a good look at the graphic. I'd hate to see what other string players would have to use to get any mileage out of this: Can you imagine a cello in this style? A viola?
Never mind what a guitarist would think. Then again, they already have much more flexibility -- with straight-ahead electric pickups, acoustic microphones and so forth.
Hazarding a guess, I can't see many other violin players picking this up and saying it'd be all that useful. I'm not a musician, so this is just an opinion (uninformed to boot), but I have taken some public performance classes with jazz guitar and whatnot. I don't know how a classical fiddler would actively choose this over an electrified violin -- surely he or she would have to spend a lot of time finessing the MIDI code that something like this would generate.
Wish him luck, surely, but don't hold your breath...
And how does this stop people from putting crappy MIDI on their websites ?:)
There are quite a few books out...
on
Linux Textbooks?
·
· Score: 2
...if you are willing to look at the bigger picture, namely, in terms of
history & heritage
ethos and methodology.
It's practically axiomatic that you don't want to bombard the students with too much, too soon. So here's how I would do it (I'm someone who came to using Linux the self-taught way, so you may want to approach it differently).
Historical reasons for Unix development: I would summarise (and not ask that students purchase) Peter Salus' A Quarter-Century of Unix. While it's fascinating, your students may find it a bit too trainspotter-ish/nitpicky or even hard to find. As well, various online sources have potted histories of the OS available.
I'd want to talk briefly - no longer than 30 minutes to an hour - about the Unix incompatibilities that arose in the 1980s, and how they led to Unix fragmentation. This would be a good set-up for compare-and-contrast exercises with, say, the Microsoft situation today, as well as Apple's Macintosh development. Most importantly, it leads you straight into short summaries of how and why Linux/BSD grew out of the chaos. Also, there's the historical section of the FreeBSD Handbook online -- it's pretty cool.
You don't have to get religious about using Linux or the BSDs; just demonstrate how they work and let your students decide for themselves if they like it or not.
For an introduction to general Unix architecture: there are free online versions of the old Macmillan Press textbook, Unix Unleashed, floating around, replete with chapter exercises and so forth. Also look at Jon Lasser's Think Unix. Finally, the Running Linux book is quite good for introductory-level practical tips and tricks. This last book is probably the only one I'd recommend for purchase.
In summary, there are a lot of books around. A search on Amazon will be much more complete than I could ever be, but I think this should give a few hints. Good luck!
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone find it coincidental that the researcher was a guy by the name of Hershey, working at the choc maker? IIRC the Mayans consumed chocolate as a savoury food, not a sweetened one; they'd use it to add flavour to meat and veg, or supplement chilies of various types (ya, I know they did mention the last part). Apparently sweetening chocolate was a later European idea. Anyone willing/able to confirm this?
If you want to ease yourself in, I'd suggest using a p2p client and downloading some Essential Mixes (The link goes to the BBC's Radio One dance music page). Recommendations, tracklistings and flamewars from plenty of users at the Essential Mix discussion site. Personal favourites I would recommend:
I would also suggest looking at related artists. Dance music encompasses a lot of styles, and cross-pollination goes on all the time. Massive Attack are another excellent act; all of their albums are great. One non-dance music act I love has to be Spiritualized. Though they don't really do dance music per se, they have an ethos and sensibility that matches well. Perfect morning-after music.
I've been lucky enough to see nearly all the acts listed above, and yes, they are all better live. Best of luck!
As the article points out the government is setting up consultation centres to handle complaints. Redress from the courts, however, is nothing like what we see in Western cultures, let alone British, Australian, New Zealand, American or Canadian courts. In Japan, court cases are long, excessively-drawn-out affairs that do not generally reduce to simple answers. In fact, I'd hypothesise that many outside legal advisers would view the Japanese system as hopelessly hidebound.
I think that the social pressures extant in Japanese society probably could develop into more effective constraints -- about the only aspects of the law that I think would be useful are the 'naming-and-shaming' ones, as bad publicity will lead to a direct and measurable loss of business.
The thing is, DoCoMo might have had better luck in controlling this earlier by :
If the phone companies are resorting to calling for help, they must have really lost control of the situation, as they generally don't like to take this route.
Right, this is definitely offtopic, but why is MandrakeForum *never* the first to reveal this kind of thing? I switched to Debian for different reasons, but it has always amazed me that the community site for Mdk users is seemingly the last to have this information.
Given that Mdk is an avowedly newbie-oriented distro, one would think that the company would have a clear interest in getting this out to its 'channels', to the party faithful, *first*.
They did take the piss out of this type of thing. You can see the image here.
I wonder if there is a reason why the underrated songwriters in legendary bands (cf. G. Harrison) have gone. Probably just a coincidence.
Rest in peace.
but it lacked in the execution. In all honesty the Frontline special on the fall of the dotcoms, broadcast originally 24 January of this year, explained certain aspects of the current malaise much more dramatically -- and sounded like less of a history lesson to boot.
The companion website linked above has an extensive set of links and interviews. Highly recommended.
meaning not 'I know what to do with source,' but rather, 'I may not know what to do with source, but I bet I can find someone else out there who does'.
Speaking only for myself, I'd say that the knock-on effects were the only thing that decided it -- more documentation, more books, more info out there. The fact of having to pay for it was not a problem; it being absent would be.
I used to be a dotbomb manager and one of my employees loved using CF. Looked cool. Anyway, after getting laid off I figured I'd go with PHP for consulting work (no CF on Linux, you see) and I haven't looked back.
The thing that clicked for me was the fact that I could get documentation, textbooks and all the source easily with PHP. I suppose if CF is moving more to an open-source model that things might improve for Macromedia too. Who knows?
Anyway, thank you. That was very insightful and I hope the moderators recognise your comment as such (if you care about such things).
What does CF do that say, PHP or Perl does not?
of 'We Are All Made of Stars' kicks the original into submission completely. Sorry, Mr Hall, but your latest album blows goats.
First, you decided to release the same record again. Then, you whored yourself -- and admitted as such -- by putting yourself on the cover of literally every magazine you could find. To blame people with burners is missing the point. Hell, how the hell did you get to be where you are today? Aren't you the artist who lives in downtown Manhattan with the ascetic's loft and the loaded studio and the Macintoshes?
I appreciate Moby, I think he does valuable work, but when he says, 'I'm not blaming tech-savvy people...' you have to wonder why he feels the need to rationalise in that way.
I'm not a Flash expert, and no, I wasn't complaining as such. I take your point about the OpenSWF website though, thanks.
I implied by mentioning the Ming extensions that there were/are plans to just simply write Flash using whatever other tools (on Linux/*BSD), but you're right, I should have noted that explicitly.
... but my guess is that this is nothing more than a sop to the people who would want to use/advocate/further SVG (main target) or the Ming/PHP extensions (secondary target). They're not really releasing the source to Flash. They're not really committing to making Flash-capable editors available a la FlashMX. This strikes me as really just a 'cover-yer-ass' move. Looks nice from faraway, but quite ugly up close.
... and I even know two people that work at Macromedia. Oh well...
The acid test should be whether or not they decide to open it up so that ordinary people can just plug in an Emacs mode and write Flash code. And how likely is that?
It's too bad, even with all the people around Slashdot that hate Flash. I don't see a lot of Windows users with SVG plug-ins
I'm a Vancouverite: some recommendations if you make it out here: CDs are particularly cheap at A&B Sound. Head down to Stanley Park, it's a huge peninsula with North America's first- or second-largest park (can't remember if Central Park in NYC is bigger or smaller). We don't call it 'the Couve' -- that's just hokey.
It's a toonie. Not 'twoonie'.
Forget about the Internet access. Not that we don't have it (of course we do!), but it's a *holiday**.
The aquarium, which is very close to the zoo in Stanley Park, is much cooler. Really.
The dense residential area just south of Stanley Park is called the West End, and boasts the highest urban densities on the continent. Plenty of good Japanese restaurants there, particularly along Denman street.
And hey, we've got lots of great cheap bud too. Head down to Blunt Brothers on Hastings. Just please don't go on about how socialist we are. We know. And we don't care.
Used to live in the UK, and AG was the best way for me to find that fix of E-Mixes from R1. Doubly unfortunate that AG decided to pull its services today.
Of course, to people who don't care about their media, the following will not apply, but...
Just think of how much farther down the hole like-minded people will go without proper sources of music. Guess the only solution is to leave North America again.
Is the fact that the issue is one of control, not source-v-binary. In this case you suggest, the question would be, 'Which packages are important?'
If you want a desktop, you will have different needs to desiring a server. You will want eye-candy. So who decides what the important packages are?
Policy dictates, if you use Debian. Something or other, if you use Red Hat or Mandrake. Gentoo and LFS put the control in your hands.
Doing what you suggest can be done, but the question of control then comes up. Either you trust others to know their Linux (binary), or you dig yourself and come up with the goods (source).
For me, it's Debian unstable. I don't have time to look at recompiling all the source for any machine at the moment, though I won't rule it out. And I have no problem whatsoever following what the Debian Project recommends as the results have been nearly perfect thus far.
It really depends on what you want to do.
[Welling & Thomson:] A good book, ruined by poor publishing or editing.
You summed it up better than me!
I'll say, though, that I was in the same boat: no previous experience with PHP or MySQL. Checked the errata site. Before even buying the book in the first place, I read the user reviews on Amazon. I followed W&T's advice to look at both online references, and in total, learned a lot more than just the book's material (well, OK, I felt more comfortable when I ran into problems).
To anyone looking at this subject area, do check out this book. It *is* good once you get past the first fifty pages.
MySQL/PHP4 Database Applications, by Jay Greenspan and Brad Bulger, Hungry Minds, ISBN 0764535374 .
Welling and Thomson's book is a good reference for those who want to get to grips with practical projects straight off the bat. It includes webmail, shopping cart, session control, and web-forum/weblog applications as a matter of course, and begins with a sturdy look at PHP first, moving to MySQL once the basics are covered.
Greenspan and Bulger's text is perhaps more traditionally concerned with constructing databases and the programming that surrounds them. Both books cover the material equally well, though I found some nuisances in the first book.
From the article: ' You never read about this kind of "security through obscurity," which can just as correctly be called "security through obsolescence." Despite this lack of publicity, it may be as effective a tactic as any other, and it can be implemented without spending a dime. '
... which raises an interesting point: If you are spending time to do this, aren't you investing -- perhaps even wasting -- a lot of it hoping that your machine is beyond reach or unknown? Is that amount of effort really worth nothing? If someone succeeds in breaking the barrier, all that conscious thinking will have gone to waste, as the end result is still 'I have a cracked machine'. With current software, you have some recourse. It may always be true that the need for endless-upgrades will persist. I don't think this sounds like an alternative.
Most people will know this, but I have to quote Jamie Zawinski: But as we all know, Linux is only free if your time has no value, and I find that my time is better spent doing things other than the endless moving-target-upgrade dance...
I could be wrong, but the knowledge and practical experience needed to try something like this looks to be of little worth to the people who'd want to do it.
Your work helped me out of a jam in using Q3 on Linux, and I remember you featured the fix on your page at one point. I don't think I got the chance to thank you properly, and am not sure if you'll read this thread again, but I just wanted to say that your work is greatly appreciated.
Thanks, I forgot that.
Some interesting things I remember:
Don't get me wrong. As I said above, I do have a strong emotional attachment to that objective Beeb reporting and its fine dramas. I just don't see how a more commercial Auntie serves the people it ostensibly has responsibility for.
For you non-Euro-resident readers, the BBC already collects a gigantic toll from the population at large ('the license fee'; currently UKP112 for a colour TV ) for its budget, in exchange for what is generally regarded as among the best programming anywhere. While I have supported the BBC strongly in the past, this kind of activity essentially is extremely unethical for a number of reasons:
The BBC, through its joint ventures in the UK (particularly publishing and radio), North America and elsewhere, is already blurring the distinction between public monies (the license fee) and private finance to an unhealthy level. With this latest effort they lose a little more of their hard-earned reputation of objectivity in pursuit of coin, and more importantly, give the British public less of a reason in future to pay the fees.
Regardless of however small the payment was in the grand scheme of things, this was wrong. To think of it another way, 100% of the British television public paid for only a small subset of viewers (less than 1%?) to receive something that they probably didn't want. How is that acceptable?
That never occurred to me. Your comment should be moderated up to insightful, no question.
Thank you -- you've made me see in a flash an overriding point to the exercise. I stand corrected.
Take a good look at the graphic. I'd hate to see what other string players would have to use to get any mileage out of this: Can you imagine a cello in this style? A viola?
:)
Never mind what a guitarist would think. Then again, they already have much more flexibility -- with straight-ahead electric pickups, acoustic microphones and so forth.
Hazarding a guess, I can't see many other violin players picking this up and saying it'd be all that useful. I'm not a musician, so this is just an opinion (uninformed to boot), but I have taken some public performance classes with jazz guitar and whatnot. I don't know how a classical fiddler would actively choose this over an electrified violin -- surely he or she would have to spend a lot of time finessing the MIDI code that something like this would generate.
Wish him luck, surely, but don't hold your breath...
And how does this stop people from putting crappy MIDI on their websites ?
It's practically axiomatic that you don't want to bombard the students with too much, too soon. So here's how I would do it (I'm someone who came to using Linux the self-taught way, so you may want to approach it differently).
I'd want to talk briefly - no longer than 30 minutes to an hour - about the Unix incompatibilities that arose in the 1980s, and how they led to Unix fragmentation. This would be a good set-up for compare-and-contrast exercises with, say, the Microsoft situation today, as well as Apple's Macintosh development. Most importantly, it leads you straight into short summaries of how and why Linux/BSD grew out of the chaos. Also, there's the historical section of the FreeBSD Handbook online -- it's pretty cool.
You don't have to get religious about using Linux or the BSDs; just demonstrate how they work and let your students decide for themselves if they like it or not.
In summary, there are a lot of books around. A search on Amazon will be much more complete than I could ever be, but I think this should give a few hints. Good luck!