I totally agree. I'd add just one more thing - all lawyers should be employed by the state and receive a fixed (but attractive) income. It wouldn't be a huge cost, because if we stopped offering huge amounts of money for these positions we might actually get in some people that are motivated by the right things. It's terrible that justice itself costs money, since it clearly skews the balance of power between individuals and corporations. The fact that your choice of a lawyer can affect a judgement over what is right and wrong is ridiculuous in itself.
Justice should not be a money making venture. It's time we accepted the responsibility to publicly fund it for everyone's benefit.
Many people are opting for removable USB hard-drives these days, since they can hold over half a terabyte, more than most small to medium size organisations would create in a century. Hard drives have an *awesome* shelf life compared to any other media, and are easy to move around when in a caddy. If you go for 2.5" drives, you can drop it in your pocket on Friday afternoon before you lock the door.
For a small office that doesn't create gigs of graphic designs every day or something, I'd recommend USB drives over tapes any day - cheaper, faster, more reliable.
Microsoft doesn't ask anybody for feedback ever. I am and have always been a Windows user. Microsoft doesn't give a flying f*ck about the quality of their software.
That's why they choose to have an OS leave balloon tips permanently obscuring your desktop. It's how they could decide to change the window close functionality on one of five apps shipped together (Excel @ Office). That's why they have no idea what a joke it is to go to microsoft.com in Australia, type in IE6, and get a page in Danish (about IE7 no less). It's why they continue to lose customers' data by having a Server OS that can shut itself down automatically with no warning. It's why you can go to Microsoft update with your Windows ME computer right now and be helpfully informed that Microsoft Update doesn't support Macintosh computers. It's why IE7 tries to recommend changing your system language to En-US when you install, even if it's already En-AU. It's why XP setup disks are the only bootable CDs in the universe to lock your ROM closed, and why all of us wait 5-10 minutes while it loads a whole heap of drivers for hardware we don't have (and pray that it realised you pressed F6 - what, you want to see a result on the screen when you do something?). It's why they still ship Messenger without the ability to f*ck off MSN Today. It's why they still haven't fixed the computer locking up when you put a CD in the drive. It's why Automatic updates asks you EVERY FIVE MINUTES, ALL DAY if you are ready to shut down. It's why there's still no way to control window raising and modal dialogs of badly written software (e.g. Explorer). It's why Windows looking up the duration of that 8GB AVI file every time the mouse passes over it is more important than you being able to drag it around.
Finally, it's the reason that they released Vista without realising the entire IT community was laughing at them. Are you listening yet Microsoft? I run a computer shop and I'm telling my customers to ignore Vista because it is entirely a waste of time for everyone. I inform them that it has no new features, no more programs, no increased security, no improvements in useability, and their faces fall. Then I inform them that it's simply a facelift and that in-fact it's a real pain in the ass to set up with their wLan, and that getting drivers for their RIAD is next to impossible right now. Then their faces get dark. Why? Because you lied to them *AGAIN* Microsoft. I don't know what you've been telling them in the media, but they are VERY disappointed when they hear what Vista really is.
But then if Microsoft stopped to improve their products to the point where they were acceptable for submission as, say, a first year programming assignment, they'd miss out on about 10 years worth of patenting Comp101 algorithms and stomping superior products out of the market.
I should say that there's not a single large software company that will provide support of any real sort with a product they sold to you for full price, so MS is not alone - anyone want to try to get some support out of EA when your game won't run?
Not to poke fun in any way, but how can you call buying into someone else's philosophy anything else but nutty? I mean actually believing in the 'official' God, Heaven and Hell, that kind of crap. What I as a non-believer can't fathom is how some of those people can even be as clear as you are on interpreting the bible, and yet still choose it above all else as a guideline for life - they really do *choose* to believe.
You sound like one of those people, but if I've misjudged you believe me I meant nothing by it. I mean, I don't believe in democracy or economics, let alone religion. I do believe in science, insofar as it is the basis for me sending you this message. The benefits of buying into the other three have yet to be established IMO.:-)
As I see it, you either have the ability to look at it objectively and move on or you have in some way been sucked in. Like any human expression you can experience the bible and take away your own 'revelations', and that's all the bible is, a human expression. It may truly be the second translation of the 'word of God', but even based on that you can't trust it any more than Oprah's book-of-the-week - until you 'believe' in something, one person's opinion on how to live life is as valid as any other's.
What you get from reading the bible will be different for everyone - for me it was a less than pleasant experience. What I don't get is the leap between "Oh yeah, the story of Jobe (sp?) really enlightened me.", and deciding you're going to stop looking for answers elsewhere. So you join a group of people that have decided this particular piece of very old literature is a good enough guideline for life that it supersedes all else. Then these people further sway your thinking through agreeing to interpret things a certain way, depending on your particular church or sect.
I just feel that a philosophy on life is something you can only arrive at by yourself. The scary part to me is that people tell their kids this stuff before they're old enough to take it in any sort of context.
Anyway, you'll probably think I'm Christan bashing, but if not I'd like to hear your response.
That's not entirely fair. The latest generation of languages and IDEs from MS is what has made it possible for more to consider porting my code to Linux.
What's really stupid is that we're still relying on three letter extensions to determine what's inside a file. If we all did away with that and the container formats (we already have multiple file streams, at least under Windows) things would be a lot cleaner.
The problem as I see it is that it's a tight sqeeze to get RAM with heatsinks onto most motherboards. How will I ever fit four water cooled DIMMs into my rig?
As for water being 'conductive', you'd probably find that your motherboard and basically anything past the PSU will work under water, it's just when water reaches 240V AC that you run into problems. Given that the PSU is at the top of most cases, I'm not as scared of water as some people, I just think it's a waste of time.
Probably right, only you couldn't measure it that way because perspiration would throw things out. Come to think of it, perspiring in space would be another big way to lose your heat. I would imagine either you end up covered in ice crystals, or you spew out water vapour into the vacuum.
This is why we *have* to get into space en masse - to put all this uncertainty about what happens when you get sucked out the airlock to rest.
This is stupid. People are going on about black body radiation. People certainly do NOT count as black bodies - you don't have an infinitely tiny hole through which you lose your heat, you radiate it from your body in every direction, and you exhale it in your breath. Having no atmosphere is why space might not *feel* cold, but it also stops you from warming your immediate surroundings to prevent loss of heat. Believe me that after a short while you will be freezing in space, assuming of course you aren't in direct sunlight and closer to the sun than, say, Jupiter.
I see what you're getting at. It's a very good point. I do think though that if you are thinking about cross-platform or even just well modularised design you would separate the business logic from the GUI, but I am in the exact situation you're describing right now. My app works just great but even though I've been conscious of it I know there is still code in the GUI that should be in the core. Still, there's only so much your IDE can do for you, and if you just want to write a Windows only app, you can do it a hell of a lot faster with Visual Studio than just about any other tool (disclaimer: I use VS for basically everything and haven't played with Eclipse or MonoDevelop or anything else for more than a few minutes).
As for.NET versus MFC, there really is no comparison. The MFC wizards were quite capable of doing all the foot shooting for you, whereas the.NET ones produce partial classes etc. and don't generally backfire and produce code that won't compile. They're also a lot less bitchy about having their output modified by you. The code for.NET generated Forms looks kinda like an AWT class from Java, where as MFC used its own special syntax, not to mention being one of the ugliest APIs for Windowing ever. To debug.NET forms is generally easy, whereas with MFC crashes that did occur were often found inside system classes that could appear to be broken themselves.
I know my knowledge and skills have improved a hell of a lot since the MFC days, but I am sure the improvements are not all me.:-)
Is it safe to bet on Mono? Linux developers I know seem to be assuming that MS will find a way to keep Mono one step behind. They like.NET and would love to develop for it, but they're scared to.
Well,.NET 3.0 has just come out and Mono still doesn't have Forms 2.0 support, but then again Gtk# 2.8.3 is available. As a primarily Windows developer, I'm looking to these developments in order to go cross-platform with my code. I mean,.NET 1.1 support is basically complete. The only thing you're really going to miss, even if you were completely stuck with.NET 1.1 support only (which you aren't) is generics.
They're also scared that the.NET ecosystem developed by Windows programmers will have all kinds of weird and unexpected dependencies... that every web services framework and cryptography library and logging API will end up requiring Windows Forms and DirectX. (After all, every Windows program seems to hide all its functionality inside GUI controls, which makes just as much sense.
This is 100% pure FUD. The.NET API is at least as clean and clear-cut as Java's, if not more-so. Dependencies like this really don't exist, I can guarantee you.
And if you aren't happy with event based programming of Forms that's fine, because they aren't locking you into it, just making it incredibly easy to throw together a simple interface. You also have to remember it is the only way a chump programmer can be restricted to behavious that lead to useable apps (given how terrible the MS windowing foundation is to begin with) and maintainable code. My hat really goes off to.NET and VS2005 in that respect.
Take a look at what people got themselves into with MFC in C++, and then see how well laid out a chump app is with.NET and C#. It still may not be a simple task to get a.NET application working under Linux, but look how far we've come.
One thing that would really drive Mono along would be if all these Linux scaredy-cats stopped hesitating and started using Mono and MonoDevelop (fantastic project) more seriously.
Ah-ha! I stand corrected. My experiences with this were under Debian, which I would have thought to be using the latest threading model, but if what you're saying is correct it definitely wasn't.
Google and I will now go and get my facts straight...
So you went to college to do something you clearly weren't interested in in your spare time, and wondered why you weren't enjoying the class as much as everyone else? Were you seriously planning to be a career geek or did you just think you'd be rich once you had the piece of paper?
To be clear, C# is a language specification and so is definitively as cross-platform as you get, and the only part of.NET not well supported by Mono is Windows.Forms (and of course the various SDKs like DirectX).
My 2c - pThreads suck ass. There's nothing worse than looking at 1000 Java 'processes' on your JSP server and wondering which ones will die if you kill one. It also makes it hard for the OS to figure out that App X hasn't had any CPU time for over 500ms.
"hey, if the USA and the USSR wipe themselves out tomorrow, where's the downside?" Well, the downside is that the world just ended.
Spoken like a true American (I'll assume you're not from the USSR since the US basically ended their world around 10 years ago). Do you honestly believe we'd miss you, McDonald's, lawyers out of control, the Iraq war and all that other stuff???
Thanks for replying. It's important to note that VC does a *lot* more to produce sound than the average VST host, and I know it doesn't sound impressive yet but one day it will do a lot more. There is room for optimisation but VC will never perform as well as a plain PCM processing program.
I admit the playing around bit is not easy in VC right now. The sample playing thing is being examined, but there are some major technical hurdles to injecting data into the mixing desk without having a machine to do it. As for controls on the synths, well I'm *really* hoping that someone will start writing me some decent synths soon, otherwise I'll have to spruce them up myself. I thought being able to draw a waveform and envelope with your mouse and do AM synthesis would keep people out of trouble for a fair while!
One final thing, could you elaborate on what you mean by intuitive interface? Any more tips on this or anything else would be great.
I can assure you I've got nothing to do with MS, in fact I hate everything about them *except* C# and their free development environments. To be clear though, the only thing that doesn't work in C# under Linux is Windows.Forms, MS's windowing library, which only an idiot would expect to find a Linux version of. I mean, they're evil and all that, but to give away the core of your OS as part of a free and open language specification would be commercial suicide, and they're not stupid.
If you are serious about this, point me in the direction of a Linux GUI developer with a bunch of spare time on their hands.;-)
You just clearly haven't used a tracker in a very long time. Most of them allow for realtime input, interface with MIDI etc. There's not much (at an audio level) difference between modern trackers and other tools like FruityLoops and CuBase. What I'm getting at is that 90% of music has been through a computer before you get to hear it and you'd be surprised at the tools people use, as the interview states.
Seriously, if you think computers only make techno you need to read up on music post production since about 1980. The extra bonus DVD in the QOTSA album Lullabies To Paralyze shows a *hell* of a lot of old-mate standing around playing his guitar into a computer, so much so it makes me wonder whether they sound even remotely like themselves outside the studio. As anyone who's seen a concert by someone like this recently can tell you it definitely is not always the case - some of these guys seriously can't play in time or in tune without the help of studios full of computers.
Hi, I'm the developer. Can I ask what hardware you're running? VC runs pretty nice on my 3800+ X2, but I'm not sure what sort of hardware it *won't* work on. Well, I do know it doesn't work on a Celery 650 with 64 megs of RAM running ME, but that isn't really surprising.:-D
Thanks for the feedback, although I wish you'd posted it at sourceforge.;-)
Why don't you read the default sound card selection off of the "Control Panel"
That's not a bad point. It's just that when you're using ASIO things like that aren't available.
What's up with the "(fix bad sound)" labels? (Audio panel)
Well, it's basically that surround and 3D sound output have yet to be tested, and when you ask for more channels than are available you can sometimes get a working audio chain that spits static.
Why do I only have "Desktop" or "MyDocs" as choices for "Recording Directory"
Because I haven't figured out how to make a file requester part of my generalised preferences system yet.:-)
Don't put the "HELP" button in red text.
Noted, but it is just a matter of opinion. The whole reason I wanted to get on slashdot was so I could find out how people feel about these things - don't forget I've been working in the dark here for almost two years.:-)
What's up with the "Learn about stuff!"
Since you just downloaded VC for the first time, you are a prime candidate to be learning about stuff. Otherwise why are you here?:-p
No, it's not true that "You've Upgraded!". I just installed the software for the first time.
Isn't that an upgrade?:-D Sorry but you're being pedantic now.
Why is the "show next startup" box checked by default?
If you'd launched it more than once you'd know.;-)
Don't bug me with the "Violet needs testers and developers" prompt. WTF do you think I'm doing?
So far, about infinity percent more than the 15,000 people who've downloaded VC to date. Sorry that it bugs you, but again you can't have played with it for long since it goes away after the first time play is pressed on each run. Again, clearly not a message aimed at someone like yourself.
OK, I loaded a sample. Where's the "play sample" button?
You've got no idea what adding that will entail.:-o OK, so I've been avoiding what seems like a pretty obvious feature, but there are plenty more that need the attention and won't take a month to implement.
Why don't you start with at least one track in a new pattern?
Because tracks are by definition optional elements, and because so far there's no way for the machine developer to indicate what is a 'default' track and what isn't. Thanks for the suggestion though.
Hope this didn't come across as brusque, I've got a lot more feedback than usual to deal with today.:-) Thanks, have a nice day.
You're thinking of musicians in the general sense. There is a sub-class of musicians that have been making computers make noise with far less than what we have today for over 20 years. At this point, VC is aimed squarely at these people. Chump friendliness can come later.
Additionally, VC has features that no other composer has, and the genre (Buzz, Psycle, VC) does things that CuBase et. al. can't do. Of course it goes both ways, and one day I hope VC will have more features than anyone could possibly need in one sitting, but for now it is what it is - a modular tracker.
Thanks for the feedback though, it will be taken on board.
Slashdot Mirror
I totally agree. I'd add just one more thing - all lawyers should be employed by the state and receive a fixed (but attractive) income. It wouldn't be a huge cost, because if we stopped offering huge amounts of money for these positions we might actually get in some people that are motivated by the right things. It's terrible that justice itself costs money, since it clearly skews the balance of power between individuals and corporations. The fact that your choice of a lawyer can affect a judgement over what is right and wrong is ridiculuous in itself.
Justice should not be a money making venture. It's time we accepted the responsibility to publicly fund it for everyone's benefit.
Many people are opting for removable USB hard-drives these days, since they can hold over half a terabyte, more than most small to medium size organisations would create in a century. Hard drives have an *awesome* shelf life compared to any other media, and are easy to move around when in a caddy. If you go for 2.5" drives, you can drop it in your pocket on Friday afternoon before you lock the door.
For a small office that doesn't create gigs of graphic designs every day or something, I'd recommend USB drives over tapes any day - cheaper, faster, more reliable.
Microsoft doesn't ask anybody for feedback ever. I am and have always been a Windows user. Microsoft doesn't give a flying f*ck about the quality of their software.
That's why they choose to have an OS leave balloon tips permanently obscuring your desktop. It's how they could decide to change the window close functionality on one of five apps shipped together (Excel @ Office). That's why they have no idea what a joke it is to go to microsoft.com in Australia, type in IE6, and get a page in Danish (about IE7 no less). It's why they continue to lose customers' data by having a Server OS that can shut itself down automatically with no warning. It's why you can go to Microsoft update with your Windows ME computer right now and be helpfully informed that Microsoft Update doesn't support Macintosh computers. It's why IE7 tries to recommend changing your system language to En-US when you install, even if it's already En-AU. It's why XP setup disks are the only bootable CDs in the universe to lock your ROM closed, and why all of us wait 5-10 minutes while it loads a whole heap of drivers for hardware we don't have (and pray that it realised you pressed F6 - what, you want to see a result on the screen when you do something?). It's why they still ship Messenger without the ability to f*ck off MSN Today. It's why they still haven't fixed the computer locking up when you put a CD in the drive. It's why Automatic updates asks you EVERY FIVE MINUTES, ALL DAY if you are ready to shut down. It's why there's still no way to control window raising and modal dialogs of badly written software (e.g. Explorer). It's why Windows looking up the duration of that 8GB AVI file every time the mouse passes over it is more important than you being able to drag it around.
Finally, it's the reason that they released Vista without realising the entire IT community was laughing at them. Are you listening yet Microsoft? I run a computer shop and I'm telling my customers to ignore Vista because it is entirely a waste of time for everyone. I inform them that it has no new features, no more programs, no increased security, no improvements in useability, and their faces fall. Then I inform them that it's simply a facelift and that in-fact it's a real pain in the ass to set up with their wLan, and that getting drivers for their RIAD is next to impossible right now. Then their faces get dark. Why? Because you lied to them *AGAIN* Microsoft. I don't know what you've been telling them in the media, but they are VERY disappointed when they hear what Vista really is.
But then if Microsoft stopped to improve their products to the point where they were acceptable for submission as, say, a first year programming assignment, they'd miss out on about 10 years worth of patenting Comp101 algorithms and stomping superior products out of the market.
I should say that there's not a single large software company that will provide support of any real sort with a product they sold to you for full price, so MS is not alone - anyone want to try to get some support out of EA when your game won't run?
Not to poke fun in any way, but how can you call buying into someone else's philosophy anything else but nutty? I mean actually believing in the 'official' God, Heaven and Hell, that kind of crap. What I as a non-believer can't fathom is how some of those people can even be as clear as you are on interpreting the bible, and yet still choose it above all else as a guideline for life - they really do *choose* to believe.
:-)
You sound like one of those people, but if I've misjudged you believe me I meant nothing by it. I mean, I don't believe in democracy or economics, let alone religion. I do believe in science, insofar as it is the basis for me sending you this message. The benefits of buying into the other three have yet to be established IMO.
As I see it, you either have the ability to look at it objectively and move on or you have in some way been sucked in. Like any human expression you can experience the bible and take away your own 'revelations', and that's all the bible is, a human expression. It may truly be the second translation of the 'word of God', but even based on that you can't trust it any more than Oprah's book-of-the-week - until you 'believe' in something, one person's opinion on how to live life is as valid as any other's.
What you get from reading the bible will be different for everyone - for me it was a less than pleasant experience. What I don't get is the leap between "Oh yeah, the story of Jobe (sp?) really enlightened me.", and deciding you're going to stop looking for answers elsewhere. So you join a group of people that have decided this particular piece of very old literature is a good enough guideline for life that it supersedes all else. Then these people further sway your thinking through agreeing to interpret things a certain way, depending on your particular church or sect.
I just feel that a philosophy on life is something you can only arrive at by yourself. The scary part to me is that people tell their kids this stuff before they're old enough to take it in any sort of context.
Anyway, you'll probably think I'm Christan bashing, but if not I'd like to hear your response.
That's not entirely fair. The latest generation of languages and IDEs from MS is what has made it possible for more to consider porting my code to Linux.
What's really stupid is that we're still relying on three letter extensions to determine what's inside a file. If we all did away with that and the container formats (we already have multiple file streams, at least under Windows) things would be a lot cleaner.
The problem as I see it is that it's a tight sqeeze to get RAM with heatsinks onto most motherboards. How will I ever fit four water cooled DIMMs into my rig?
As for water being 'conductive', you'd probably find that your motherboard and basically anything past the PSU will work under water, it's just when water reaches 240V AC that you run into problems. Given that the PSU is at the top of most cases, I'm not as scared of water as some people, I just think it's a waste of time.
Probably right, only you couldn't measure it that way because perspiration would throw things out. Come to think of it, perspiring in space would be another big way to lose your heat. I would imagine either you end up covered in ice crystals, or you spew out water vapour into the vacuum.
This is why we *have* to get into space en masse - to put all this uncertainty about what happens when you get sucked out the airlock to rest.
Will I need a real Gigabyte motherboard? :-)
This is stupid. People are going on about black body radiation. People certainly do NOT count as black bodies - you don't have an infinitely tiny hole through which you lose your heat, you radiate it from your body in every direction, and you exhale it in your breath. Having no atmosphere is why space might not *feel* cold, but it also stops you from warming your immediate surroundings to prevent loss of heat. Believe me that after a short while you will be freezing in space, assuming of course you aren't in direct sunlight and closer to the sun than, say, Jupiter.
I see what you're getting at. It's a very good point. I do think though that if you are thinking about cross-platform or even just well modularised design you would separate the business logic from the GUI, but I am in the exact situation you're describing right now. My app works just great but even though I've been conscious of it I know there is still code in the GUI that should be in the core. Still, there's only so much your IDE can do for you, and if you just want to write a Windows only app, you can do it a hell of a lot faster with Visual Studio than just about any other tool (disclaimer: I use VS for basically everything and haven't played with Eclipse or MonoDevelop or anything else for more than a few minutes).
.NET versus MFC, there really is no comparison. The MFC wizards were quite capable of doing all the foot shooting for you, whereas the .NET ones produce partial classes etc. and don't generally backfire and produce code that won't compile. They're also a lot less bitchy about having their output modified by you. The code for .NET generated Forms looks kinda like an AWT class from Java, where as MFC used its own special syntax, not to mention being one of the ugliest APIs for Windowing ever. To debug .NET forms is generally easy, whereas with MFC crashes that did occur were often found inside system classes that could appear to be broken themselves.
:-)
As for
I know my knowledge and skills have improved a hell of a lot since the MFC days, but I am sure the improvements are not all me.
Is it safe to bet on Mono? Linux developers I know seem to be assuming that MS will find a way to keep Mono one step behind. They like .NET and would love to develop for it, but they're scared to.
.NET 3.0 has just come out and Mono still doesn't have Forms 2.0 support, but then again Gtk# 2.8.3 is available. As a primarily Windows developer, I'm looking to these developments in order to go cross-platform with my code. I mean, .NET 1.1 support is basically complete. The only thing you're really going to miss, even if you were completely stuck with .NET 1.1 support only (which you aren't) is generics.
.NET ecosystem developed by Windows programmers will have all kinds of weird and unexpected dependencies... that every web services framework and cryptography library and logging API will end up requiring Windows Forms and DirectX. (After all, every Windows program seems to hide all its functionality inside GUI controls, which makes just as much sense.
.NET API is at least as clean and clear-cut as Java's, if not more-so. Dependencies like this really don't exist, I can guarantee you.
.NET and VS2005 in that respect.
.NET and C#. It still may not be a simple task to get a .NET application working under Linux, but look how far we've come.
Well,
They're also scared that the
This is 100% pure FUD. The
And if you aren't happy with event based programming of Forms that's fine, because they aren't locking you into it, just making it incredibly easy to throw together a simple interface. You also have to remember it is the only way a chump programmer can be restricted to behavious that lead to useable apps (given how terrible the MS windowing foundation is to begin with) and maintainable code. My hat really goes off to
Take a look at what people got themselves into with MFC in C++, and then see how well laid out a chump app is with
One thing that would really drive Mono along would be if all these Linux scaredy-cats stopped hesitating and started using Mono and MonoDevelop (fantastic project) more seriously.
Great discussion by the way.
Ah-ha! I stand corrected. My experiences with this were under Debian, which I would have thought to be using the latest threading model, but if what you're saying is correct it definitely wasn't.
Google and I will now go and get my facts straight...
So you went to college to do something you clearly weren't interested in in your spare time, and wondered why you weren't enjoying the class as much as everyone else? Were you seriously planning to be a career geek or did you just think you'd be rich once you had the piece of paper?
To be clear, C# is a language specification and so is definitively as cross-platform as you get, and the only part of .NET not well supported by Mono is Windows.Forms (and of course the various SDKs like DirectX).
My 2c - pThreads suck ass. There's nothing worse than looking at 1000 Java 'processes' on your JSP server and wondering which ones will die if you kill one. It also makes it hard for the OS to figure out that App X hasn't had any CPU time for over 500ms.
The story is flamebait. Any P2P has legit and illegitimate uses, and clearly the poster has never heard of Democracy TV.
"hey, if the USA and the USSR wipe themselves out tomorrow, where's the downside?" Well, the downside is that the world just ended.
Spoken like a true American (I'll assume you're not from the USSR since the US basically ended their world around 10 years ago). Do you honestly believe we'd miss you, McDonald's, lawyers out of control, the Iraq war and all that other stuff???
I thought only evil M$ released code that has security problems. Didn't they patent it for Vista? :-p
Thanks for replying. It's important to note that VC does a *lot* more to produce sound than the average VST host, and I know it doesn't sound impressive yet but one day it will do a lot more. There is room for optimisation but VC will never perform as well as a plain PCM processing program. I admit the playing around bit is not easy in VC right now. The sample playing thing is being examined, but there are some major technical hurdles to injecting data into the mixing desk without having a machine to do it. As for controls on the synths, well I'm *really* hoping that someone will start writing me some decent synths soon, otherwise I'll have to spruce them up myself. I thought being able to draw a waveform and envelope with your mouse and do AM synthesis would keep people out of trouble for a fair while! One final thing, could you elaborate on what you mean by intuitive interface? Any more tips on this or anything else would be great.
I can assure you I've got nothing to do with MS, in fact I hate everything about them *except* C# and their free development environments. To be clear though, the only thing that doesn't work in C# under Linux is Windows.Forms, MS's windowing library, which only an idiot would expect to find a Linux version of. I mean, they're evil and all that, but to give away the core of your OS as part of a free and open language specification would be commercial suicide, and they're not stupid.
;-)
If you are serious about this, point me in the direction of a Linux GUI developer with a bunch of spare time on their hands.
You just clearly haven't used a tracker in a very long time. Most of them allow for realtime input, interface with MIDI etc. There's not much (at an audio level) difference between modern trackers and other tools like FruityLoops and CuBase. What I'm getting at is that 90% of music has been through a computer before you get to hear it and you'd be surprised at the tools people use, as the interview states.
Seriously, if you think computers only make techno you need to read up on music post production since about 1980. The extra bonus DVD in the QOTSA album Lullabies To Paralyze shows a *hell* of a lot of old-mate standing around playing his guitar into a computer, so much so it makes me wonder whether they sound even remotely like themselves outside the studio. As anyone who's seen a concert by someone like this recently can tell you it definitely is not always the case - some of these guys seriously can't play in time or in tune without the help of studios full of computers.
Anyway, enough rambling from me.
Hi, I'm the developer. Can I ask what hardware you're running? VC runs pretty nice on my 3800+ X2, but I'm not sure what sort of hardware it *won't* work on. Well, I do know it doesn't work on a Celery 650 with 64 megs of RAM running ME, but that isn't really surprising. :-D
Thanks for the feedback, although I wish you'd posted it at sourceforge. ;-)
:-)
:-)
:-p
:-D Sorry but you're being pedantic now.
;-)
:-o OK, so I've been avoiding what seems like a pretty obvious feature, but there are plenty more that need the attention and won't take a month to implement.
:-) Thanks, have a nice day.
Why don't you read the default sound card selection off of the "Control Panel"
That's not a bad point. It's just that when you're using ASIO things like that aren't available.
What's up with the "(fix bad sound)" labels? (Audio panel)
Well, it's basically that surround and 3D sound output have yet to be tested, and when you ask for more channels than are available you can sometimes get a working audio chain that spits static.
Why do I only have "Desktop" or "MyDocs" as choices for "Recording Directory"
Because I haven't figured out how to make a file requester part of my generalised preferences system yet.
Don't put the "HELP" button in red text.
Noted, but it is just a matter of opinion. The whole reason I wanted to get on slashdot was so I could find out how people feel about these things - don't forget I've been working in the dark here for almost two years.
What's up with the "Learn about stuff!"
Since you just downloaded VC for the first time, you are a prime candidate to be learning about stuff. Otherwise why are you here?
No, it's not true that "You've Upgraded!". I just installed the software for the first time.
Isn't that an upgrade?
Why is the "show next startup" box checked by default?
If you'd launched it more than once you'd know.
Don't bug me with the "Violet needs testers and developers" prompt. WTF do you think I'm doing?
So far, about infinity percent more than the 15,000 people who've downloaded VC to date. Sorry that it bugs you, but again you can't have played with it for long since it goes away after the first time play is pressed on each run. Again, clearly not a message aimed at someone like yourself.
OK, I loaded a sample. Where's the "play sample" button?
You've got no idea what adding that will entail.
Why don't you start with at least one track in a new pattern?
Because tracks are by definition optional elements, and because so far there's no way for the machine developer to indicate what is a 'default' track and what isn't. Thanks for the suggestion though.
Hope this didn't come across as brusque, I've got a lot more feedback than usual to deal with today.
You're thinking of musicians in the general sense. There is a sub-class of musicians that have been making computers make noise with far less than what we have today for over 20 years. At this point, VC is aimed squarely at these people. Chump friendliness can come later.
Additionally, VC has features that no other composer has, and the genre (Buzz, Psycle, VC) does things that CuBase et. al. can't do. Of course it goes both ways, and one day I hope VC will have more features than anyone could possibly need in one sitting, but for now it is what it is - a modular tracker.
Thanks for the feedback though, it will be taken on board.
That's not music composition, that's for printing sheet music. :-D