I can't speak to the xbox in particular, but it's probably worth pointing out that part of the dolby digital spec deals specifically with downmixing (not to be confused with downsampling, an example of which would be converting 48khz audio to 44.1khz audio) to stereo. What this means, is that if the xbox is outputting dolby digital encoded audio, it will output it in 5.1 if you have a 5.1 speaker system attached, or it will output in stereo if you have just the two speakers attached. This is all done automatically, as part of the decoding process, I believe. (This is why you don't necessarily have to select 5.1 or stereo when watching a DVD - only if the mixing engineer has provided a separate stereo mix.) A quickly googled reference, so you believe me - here.
The xbox could be different, but if it is actually dolby digital, which I would imagine it is if they are saying it is, the 5.1 output should also provide a true stereo mix, if you have a stereo speaker setup.
For what it's worth, I am a mixing engineer, though my work in surround and on films has been very limited.
Not that there aren't examples to support you (vista), but the xbox 360 is indeed in stores more or less on time. Months before the competition, as well, for whatever it's worth.
that some resourceful slashdotter will answer easily. How do you set firefox so that when filling in a form, you can tab onto pull-down menus? Really think that ought to be a default setting - hear people complain about it rather frequently.
While we're somewhat on the topic, is there a good reference guide to what everything in about:config does? That *would* be handy...
As far as the fake blood goes - recently did some blood work for a student film, and we used corn syrup, red food coloring, milk and soy sauce in varying quantities for a very nice-looking blood. Get the clear karo stuff, add plenty of food coloring, a touch of milk helps the consistency, and the soy sauce really darkens it up nicely. Smelled a bit odd, though. If you want to see the video, it's online here.
While sibelius is a bit easier to use and learn, it really lacks the feature set of finale. If you're a college student turning in assignments or giving parts to musicians who aren't really that concerned about appearance, it's fine, but for a complicated, professional-looking score, or something publishing-ready, it's really much easier (and much more possible) to do in finale. This is, in a nutshell, the trade-off that you get with these two products.
With that being said, I agree that finale is a mess sometimes. I really just wish they wouldn't push themselves for a yearly release. 2005b was in my experience the most stable finale release in some time, and another bug fix upgrade this year would have made it even better. Instead, they send out finale 2006 disks that erase your application support folder. Goodbye, address book! Plus heaps of bugs - it's faster overall, but until they come out with 2006a I'm back to using 2k5.
Ah, that's a key point - ease-of-use and productivity are quite often intrinsically linked. I predominantly use a mac for music work, though I also have a PC which I have for some PC-only music apps. When I'm working on a session, I want the computer (and especially the OS) to be as transparent as possible - I don't want it to inhibit the music-making process at all. On the mac, everything is streamlined - for example, Core Audio means that anytime I need to switch audio settings globally (i.e. from an external interface to built-in audio, which I do often on my laptop) the process is ridiculously more simple than it is on a PC (among many other niceties). Keyboard shortcuts have always been more abundant and simpler (just having the apple modifier key makes things much more standardized), and I find that they speed up my work significantly.
At any rate, I agree with you that Apple computers fare better with ease-of-use and productivity, and my point is that the two are not at all unrelated. Having an easy-to-use computer isn't just nice for grandmothers - it can be nice for advanced users as well.
See, you got it all wrong... the first paragraph should have been its own comment, aimed at a +5 funny. Then you should have replied to your own comment with the second paragraph, which would have shot for a +5 informative or interesting.
As it stands, you're just confusing the mods. Poor slashdot semantics. Go do your homework.
Sorry about that. Typical slashdot assumption of a US-only readership.:)
K-4 = kindergarten - 4th grade, which is sometimes called lower school, and is typically the ages of 5 - 9 or 10.
P.
My mother is a music teacher for K-4, and raves about her own ipod. With it, she is able to consolidate all of the music she uses for classes (of which there is a lot) and organize it far better than she could in the days of CDs. Plus there is the added benefit that CDs get scratched or lost, whereas the ipod does not. (well, we hope it doesn't get lost. easier to keep track of than 30 CDs.)
Certainly convinced me that it was useful for her needs. Especially when program time rolls around - she can just dump the tracks to whatever songs the kids are singing into a playlist, and if they don't learn a song in time, or they want to switch the order around for whatever reason, that can be done easily and on the fly, instead of having to burn more CDs. Great use of PTA money.:)
I do audio work, and I also use external drives for all my storage. I actually used to use a 120 gb Simpletech usb/firewire drive, until I'd owned it for about 3 months and it just perished miserably and unexpectedly, taking my data with it. (One project, which I was in the middle of, wasn't backed up anywhere else, and I spent a few long days and nights getting it re-recorded.) I guess the lesson I learned from this was that you get what you pay for... the next drive I bought was from a reputable company and wasn't just the most super-dirt-cheap thing i could find, and I'm still using it with no problems after nearly 3 years. Think twice about that Simpletech drive, my friend.:)
You're right though - when I'm traveling and I record stuff directly to my laptop drive, there is a noticeable lag when editing stuff later on, especially if i'm working with a lot of different tracks. 5400 rpm totally isn't enough to handle all of what's going on.
Made even better because Tiger Direct happens to be advertising at the top of the page. Snide partisan commentary can only be improved when it is simultaneously biting the hand that feeds it.
Funny story about conformity in Florida (I live there - Coral Gables, a miami suburb). Last week, one of my housemates' parents came into town to visit. They parked their pickup truck out in front of the house, and were surprised later on to see a ticket on their truck. As it turns out, you can't park a pickup truck in front of a residence in Coral Gables. Mind you, this is a pretty nice, 3 or 4 year old pickup truck, and we park some pretty nasty old cars out there that have never been fined. Doesn't matter - you could have a pimped-out, brand-new, $50,000 truck and you still couldn't park it in front of your house. These things are apparently the epitome of unsightliness. So they got a $100 ticket for having the audacity to park a truck out front. Heaven forbid they don't drive a range rover.:)
Anyway, that story doesn't have much to do with Florida's corporate nature, but it's a good example of residents having to do ridiculous things because the city says it must be so. Coral gables has so many stupid building codes that it'd take pages to list them all, but that's the most recent example I've encountered.
What about a peer to peer merit badge? Or even just a warez merit badge, really. After all, if boy scouts can learn to build a fire without matches, they ought to be able to obtain software and music without money.
Other good alternatives would be a Home Recording merit badge, Encryption Circumvention merit badge, Leaked-DVD-Screener merit badge, Telesyncing merit badge, Console Modding merit badge, or the ever-popular Hold Down the Shift Key merit badge.
I personally would like for this to mean the return of old-timey radio dramas. After all, I can't imagine that this would ever be done by anyone other than amateurs. Our local college radio station has something similar to a radio drama (although it's a bit more of a narrative) every monday night, and it's actually quite enjoyable.
The worst part is that although they advertise the price as a monthly fee, you're charged $10/mo for a whole year right from the start. Want to use their service for a month? $120. (actually i seem to remember it being more like $90 or 100, but whatever. a lot.)
I got a free two-week trial... was a mess, and their online unsubscribing option was broken. Had to cancel the credit card payment and send a bunch of e-mails to get my money back after they charged me. All of these things don't really help them against all the other music stores out there... doing things like charging by the year and advertising by the month gives the impression that they really don't care much (aside from how much money they can extract) about their customers.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't speak to the xbox in particular, but it's probably worth pointing out that part of the dolby digital spec deals specifically with downmixing (not to be confused with downsampling, an example of which would be converting 48khz audio to 44.1khz audio) to stereo. What this means, is that if the xbox is outputting dolby digital encoded audio, it will output it in 5.1 if you have a 5.1 speaker system attached, or it will output in stereo if you have just the two speakers attached. This is all done automatically, as part of the decoding process, I believe. (This is why you don't necessarily have to select 5.1 or stereo when watching a DVD - only if the mixing engineer has provided a separate stereo mix.) A quickly googled reference, so you believe me - here.
The xbox could be different, but if it is actually dolby digital, which I would imagine it is if they are saying it is, the 5.1 output should also provide a true stereo mix, if you have a stereo speaker setup.
For what it's worth, I am a mixing engineer, though my work in surround and on films has been very limited.
P.
Not that there aren't examples to support you (vista), but the xbox 360 is indeed in stores more or less on time. Months before the competition, as well, for whatever it's worth.
P.
that some resourceful slashdotter will answer easily. How do you set firefox so that when filling in a form, you can tab onto pull-down menus? Really think that ought to be a default setting - hear people complain about it rather frequently.
While we're somewhat on the topic, is there a good reference guide to what everything in about:config does? That *would* be handy...
P.
As far as the fake blood goes - recently did some blood work for a student film, and we used corn syrup, red food coloring, milk and soy sauce in varying quantities for a very nice-looking blood. Get the clear karo stuff, add plenty of food coloring, a touch of milk helps the consistency, and the soy sauce really darkens it up nicely. Smelled a bit odd, though. If you want to see the video, it's online here.
P.
While sibelius is a bit easier to use and learn, it really lacks the feature set of finale. If you're a college student turning in assignments or giving parts to musicians who aren't really that concerned about appearance, it's fine, but for a complicated, professional-looking score, or something publishing-ready, it's really much easier (and much more possible) to do in finale. This is, in a nutshell, the trade-off that you get with these two products.
With that being said, I agree that finale is a mess sometimes. I really just wish they wouldn't push themselves for a yearly release. 2005b was in my experience the most stable finale release in some time, and another bug fix upgrade this year would have made it even better. Instead, they send out finale 2006 disks that erase your application support folder. Goodbye, address book! Plus heaps of bugs - it's faster overall, but until they come out with 2006a I'm back to using 2k5.
P.
A hard-copy of War of the Worlds. Putting it on the USB drive doesn't count.
Fuck that. I'll take my hard copy of Lord of the Flies, thank you very much. Way more useful.
Whatever man. Like us geeks really need another one-arm-only exercise.
Ah, that's a key point - ease-of-use and productivity are quite often intrinsically linked. I predominantly use a mac for music work, though I also have a PC which I have for some PC-only music apps. When I'm working on a session, I want the computer (and especially the OS) to be as transparent as possible - I don't want it to inhibit the music-making process at all. On the mac, everything is streamlined - for example, Core Audio means that anytime I need to switch audio settings globally (i.e. from an external interface to built-in audio, which I do often on my laptop) the process is ridiculously more simple than it is on a PC (among many other niceties). Keyboard shortcuts have always been more abundant and simpler (just having the apple modifier key makes things much more standardized), and I find that they speed up my work significantly.
At any rate, I agree with you that Apple computers fare better with ease-of-use and productivity, and my point is that the two are not at all unrelated. Having an easy-to-use computer isn't just nice for grandmothers - it can be nice for advanced users as well.
P.
See, you got it all wrong... the first paragraph should have been its own comment, aimed at a +5 funny. Then you should have replied to your own comment with the second paragraph, which would have shot for a +5 informative or interesting.
As it stands, you're just confusing the mods. Poor slashdot semantics. Go do your homework.
Sorry about that. Typical slashdot assumption of a US-only readership. :)
K-4 = kindergarten - 4th grade, which is sometimes called lower school, and is typically the ages of 5 - 9 or 10.
P.
My mother is a music teacher for K-4, and raves about her own ipod. With it, she is able to consolidate all of the music she uses for classes (of which there is a lot) and organize it far better than she could in the days of CDs. Plus there is the added benefit that CDs get scratched or lost, whereas the ipod does not. (well, we hope it doesn't get lost. easier to keep track of than 30 CDs.)
:)
Certainly convinced me that it was useful for her needs. Especially when program time rolls around - she can just dump the tracks to whatever songs the kids are singing into a playlist, and if they don't learn a song in time, or they want to switch the order around for whatever reason, that can be done easily and on the fly, instead of having to burn more CDs. Great use of PTA money.
P.
Introducing the Nintendo Revolution, available in Black, Platinum, White, Red, and.... Vomit?
I do audio work, and I also use external drives for all my storage. I actually used to use a 120 gb Simpletech usb/firewire drive, until I'd owned it for about 3 months and it just perished miserably and unexpectedly, taking my data with it. (One project, which I was in the middle of, wasn't backed up anywhere else, and I spent a few long days and nights getting it re-recorded.) I guess the lesson I learned from this was that you get what you pay for... the next drive I bought was from a reputable company and wasn't just the most super-dirt-cheap thing i could find, and I'm still using it with no problems after nearly 3 years. Think twice about that Simpletech drive, my friend. :)
You're right though - when I'm traveling and I record stuff directly to my laptop drive, there is a noticeable lag when editing stuff later on, especially if i'm working with a lot of different tracks. 5400 rpm totally isn't enough to handle all of what's going on.
Made even better because Tiger Direct happens to be advertising at the top of the page. Snide partisan commentary can only be improved when it is simultaneously biting the hand that feeds it.
P.
Funny story about conformity in Florida (I live there - Coral Gables, a miami suburb). Last week, one of my housemates' parents came into town to visit. They parked their pickup truck out in front of the house, and were surprised later on to see a ticket on their truck. As it turns out, you can't park a pickup truck in front of a residence in Coral Gables. Mind you, this is a pretty nice, 3 or 4 year old pickup truck, and we park some pretty nasty old cars out there that have never been fined. Doesn't matter - you could have a pimped-out, brand-new, $50,000 truck and you still couldn't park it in front of your house. These things are apparently the epitome of unsightliness. So they got a $100 ticket for having the audacity to park a truck out front. Heaven forbid they don't drive a range rover. :)
Anyway, that story doesn't have much to do with Florida's corporate nature, but it's a good example of residents having to do ridiculous things because the city says it must be so. Coral gables has so many stupid building codes that it'd take pages to list them all, but that's the most recent example I've encountered.
P.
What about a peer to peer merit badge? Or even just a warez merit badge, really. After all, if boy scouts can learn to build a fire without matches, they ought to be able to obtain software and music without money.
Other good alternatives would be a Home Recording merit badge, Encryption Circumvention merit badge, Leaked-DVD-Screener merit badge, Telesyncing merit badge, Console Modding merit badge, or the ever-popular Hold Down the Shift Key merit badge.
P.
Those bastards!! If all this price fixing hadn't been going on, I'd have been making money by running all my free software!!
P.
I personally would like for this to mean the return of old-timey radio dramas. After all, I can't imagine that this would ever be done by anyone other than amateurs. Our local college radio station has something similar to a radio drama (although it's a bit more of a narrative) every monday night, and it's actually quite enjoyable.
The worst part is that although they advertise the price as a monthly fee, you're charged $10/mo for a whole year right from the start. Want to use their service for a month? $120. (actually i seem to remember it being more like $90 or 100, but whatever. a lot.)
I got a free two-week trial... was a mess, and their online unsubscribing option was broken. Had to cancel the credit card payment and send a bunch of e-mails to get my money back after they charged me. All of these things don't really help them against all the other music stores out there... doing things like charging by the year and advertising by the month gives the impression that they really don't care much (aside from how much money they can extract) about their customers.
p.