I just got home from practicing for six and a half hours for a doctoral degree recital I am performing tomorrow. I could have just put together a video instead. I'm sure I would get an A from the committee if I did!
(I'd like to send a special shout out to Karlheinz Stockhausen for writing pieces that have to be performed from memory but are next to impossible to memorize, such as In Freundschaft. Thanks so much!)
Oh, and if any of you folks are in Minneapolis tomorrow (Wednesday, December 13), be at Ultan Hall on the University of Minnesota campus (in the Ferguson Hall building) at 3:45 p.m. to witness the carnage. Thanks!
Windows also has a new 'randomization' layer, which slightly changes the memory configuration of every Vista machine to make it harder for co-ordinated attacks to affect scores of machines at the same time.
Huh? What is this, and why would it make any difference whatsoever in preventing exploits?
I recall in elementary school, in a unit on inventions, being told of a local inventor who patented some sort of braille tab that could be attached to bills with the intent that banks would add and remove these tabs for blind people. The reason they were not successful was exactly what you described -- the device was deemed unnecessary because of folding the bills.
(That was long enough ago that I'm almost positive the patent has expired now, for the record.)
I see that the defendant has requested a jury trial, an interesting choice... How likely is some sort of jury nullification, should the case actually go to a jury trial? (Of course, the jury could simply find that the facts support the defendant's case, which is not the same as nullification. How would we know the difference?)
When you think about it... all these musical accompaniment systems react in real-time to MIDI input.
Minor nit-pick here... MIDI is by definition computer-generated, sometimes in response to direct human input (like a human playing a MIDI keyboard, for instance). SmartMusic, for example, takes microphone input from a live performer and "follows" the performer with a predefined accompaniment. If I play my saxophone into the microphone, MIDI is not the result, but the computer can somewhat follow me, so long as I am playing something for which it has an accompaniment program. Recent versions of Finale can supposedly generate such an accompaniment. (I give these products as examples only, not as software I would endorse; for a number of reasons, I really don't care for this company's software.)
The robot in the article, if it is taking input from a microphone, is not directly taking MIDI input.
I work a lot with Drupal and see this on the message boards often. "I'd like to see this feature built and I'm willing to pay XXX for it" Someone builds the feature and cashes in. Innovation and capitalism at work.
Some open-source projects have seemed to operate almost entirely on this principle. Take, for instance, LilyPond. Development for some time seemed to be done almost entirely by core developers who seemed to be getting paid for custom features. Spending time on these custom features, though, meant that other, more basic features were sometimes missing or lacking. (I wish I could give examples, but it has been a few months since I have used LilyPond.)
Now, the LilyPond site seems to emphasize the involvement of other developers, documentation writers, etc. There is a FAQ item that leads to a page about sponsoring features, but I wonder if the focus has shifted more toward getting other volunteer contributors. The "call-for-help" page cites these reasons for wanting help:
Hopefully, together we can address problems in the LilyPond development process, among others
* Stable releases don't happen often enough.
* Development is too much centralized.
* The learning curve is too steep.
I would say only the first reason really applies to Debian, but it is interesting that LilyPond seems to be taking the opposite approach to solving the problem.
What about the quality of the video recording? Who exactly is running the camera? (I didn't see it in the article.)
I sat through a taped lecture this morning due to the professor's planned absence. (The students were invited to attend the taping if possible, but it wasn't at a time I could attend -- no big deal.) We had one Monday as well. On Monday, the sound cut out half the time, making the lecture hard to follow. Today, the sound was fine, but if the professor wrote something on the whiteboard and I hadn't had the chance to copy it down entirely (formulae and the like), if the professor moved on to a different part of the board, the camera followed and sometimes never returned to the other part of the board. That made the tape much more useless than intended.
The twist here is that, thanks to a distance education program, all lectures are recorded and are available to us at no charge online after a ten day delay. The problem with that is that ten days can quite often be after relevant homework or exams happen. So, in ten days, I could go online to get the formulae that I did not quite capture. (Or, I could ask the professor or TA, I'm sure.) The quality of the taping matters, though. Does the professor in the article have a money-back guarantee on the service?
OK, you might not have the machines to pull this one off (though you can get them for next to nothing if you know where to look, or perhaps try an emulator). One nice thing about this idiom is the ease with which the low-res graphics can be manipulated; the kids can draw some crude pictures.
I'm serious, by the way. It's really easy to learn a few fundamental commands in Applesoft. I remember doing this in a class in probably fifth grade, and everyone seemed to like it. (I already knew how to program in the language, so I didn't necessarily learn much.) No compiler; just type RUN and you're good to go.
My friend stopped traveling by air because they were hassling her about her flute (she likes to play in her hotel at night).
Her flute? You couldn't ask for an instrument easier to inspect or to fit into an overhead compartment or under a seat (neither of which might be ideal anyway -- turbulence, etc.). She didn't seriously have to check the thing, did she?
Common sense on the part of baggage screeners might be a good thing...
But compare this to language: we know that children learn languages very fast during a 'critical period' of childhood. Children who don't learn a language at that age cannot learn one later in life. So perhaps there is a 'critical period' for being trained to be an expert at chess. We just don't know that yet (or didn't when I was taking the class 4 years ago).
I recall reading research (though I do not recall where) that suggested that study of a string instrument (violin, etc.) must be commenced by the age of 11 or 12 for the student to have any chance at all of reaching the upper echelons of mastery of the instrument. It had something to do with neurological factors related to the tactile sense of the hands, particularly the left hand. 11 or 12 is rather late to be starting a string instrument, by many accounts, but school orchestras generally start by then. I realize that this issue is basically physical rather than mental, but it is an example of age being a relatively short time limit for something.
There's no way I would check a laptop due to the potential for physical damage. I've never tried that, but I had the experience almost a decade ago of sitting on an airplane in Atlanta on the return trip from a music tour to Europe. We had to check larger instruments (including my saxophone) given the amount of other stuff we needed. The baggage handlers were doing things like opening cases and playing instruments while we watched, in horror, out the window. Of course, they were not particularly careful in handling the luggage either, and nearly everyone had damage to get repaired when we made it home. I was lucky enough to escape with only a $30 repair for a bent key rod. Most laptops anymore are fairly rugged, but even if reasonably well-packed (knowing good and well that you'll probably have to unpack your bag for security screening), I cannot see most laptops surviving that kind of handling.
While Intel's gaffe is possibly the most famous, consider this tidbit from Applesoft Basic:
] PRINT 8 +.01 +.01 8.020000002
Granted, this was a software implementation bug, not a hardware bug. (I don't recall the exact precision of the response, but it was something of that nature.)
I teach guitar, among lots of other instruments and voice. Every so often, someone wants to learn some song from tablature, or they come to me only knowing how to read tablature with no acutal experience with regular notation. This is all fine and good -- I can help the student learn notation then -- but I typically point out several limitations of tablature (several of which apply also to chord diagrams, which are not the same thing as tab; a lot of people confuse the two):
Tablature does not convey rhythm at all. You have to already know the tune to have any idea how to play it. For most people, this necessitates a recording so that they can listen to the piece again and again. If they didn't pirate the recording, then the recording industry actually made money from this individual.
Tablature is non-portable. It is not a notation that makes sense for playing the music on any other instrument or singing it.
Tablature misses the visual cues that standard notation has. For instance, in standard notation, notes of higher pitch are higher on the staff, and there is a correlation between the distance between notes on the staff and the distance between the actual pitches. Not so with tablature.
Learning tablature is not the same as learning to read music. This one is somewhat obvious, but the student's understanding of music in general increases just by learning standard notation.
I am sure there are other issues as well. That said, I cannot see how shutting down a tablature site benefits the musicians at all; if anything, it encourages recording sales.
While the recording artist could potentially be disappointed with other musicians' inferior performances of their tunes, anyone in the U.S. can record and sell an original rendition of anything that has already been recorded, thanks to compulsory mechanical licensing, whether the original artist likes it or not. Of course, few amateurs are going to be able to pull off any kind of publishable album, but with the ubiquity of computerized recording tools (ProTools, etc.), it's not hard to make independent CD's anymore. Not that anyone but friends and family will buy them...
I know of people who play music in the background of their RPG sessions to add a little mood music, but I don't think I'll be hearing of any orchestras in people's living rooms any time soon.
Yes. Live orchestral music in living rooms is so last-century. And German.
(I know most of you won't be able to open that link, but Wikipedia doesn't have it and I couldn't find another reasonable source. My apologies.)
That alone tells me that game studios may be able to produce music on the same levels as Record studios, perhaps for a fraction of the price.
Interesting. My concept of recent video game music is more like film music, but with more possibilities due to non-linearity. It should be possible to have a very effective soundtrack without huge "forces" (composers refer to the number of performers required to perform a composition in this manner) with a more reasonable budget. This soundtrack would not necessarily be among the greatest ever, but it might be more effective than a commercial music ripoff.
One of my life goals is to, at some point, write and produce a video game score. I never seem to have enough time to do it; I was trying last summer to find an open-source game that I was sure would actually be produced, but even then, it really wasn't a project for which I could do justice in a summer. Once I'm not in school anymore in three years or so, I might be interested in a commercial video game project, if someone was willing to hire someone with "only" a bachelor's degree in composition. (I'm a doctoral student in performance. Hey, maybe I could even play on the soundtrack.)
Was there a point to this post? Probably not. This is Slashdot, after all. But if there was a point, it would be that creativity might help with budget issues, enabling more video games to have quality music.
If you're a university student, look around for financial assistance to get a machine.
Typically, you can get additional money added to your aid eligibility (for subsidized loans, etc.) one time for a computer purchase. Check with your financial aid department if that interests you.
In the comments I got notified that other websites than the official QPAD website sell the pad much cheaper (see comments). A price of 29.50 euro is almost 40 percent cheaper than the official website and an ideal price for the mouse pad.
So the mouse pad can be found elsewhere cheaper. Thanks so much for telling us where. For that matter, there is an ideal price for a mouse pad? I thought that was roughly 0 euros.
IIS 6.0 Resource Kit Tools has an application called SelfSSL.exe that does everything for you to self-sign a certificate in IIS. It does work in IIS 5.1 as well (I used it last week) under WinXP. It was definitely possible before to self-sign a certificate in IIS, but this tool makes it a lot easier.
Billions in click fraud? That sure doesn't compare with that $90 million class-action "settlement" for which I received notice the other day (including $30 million in attorney's fees). And, of course, other than the attorney's fees, it's all in advertising credits.
This question is interesting in light of claims in television campaign ads by Chet Culver, who is running for the Democratic nomination for governor of Iowa, that he will create a Silicon Valley in Iowa. There's some sound bite in there about creating tech jobs to keep "bright" kids in Iowa. For some reason I can't figure out, he's apparently leading the polls for the primary.
For all kinds of reasons that have already been posted, I don't buy it. Chet, you're not the original poster, are you? Just now doing research?
(Unfortunately, if he wins the primary, I will end up voting for him for governor anyway. Ick.)
I am posting from an HP Pavilion ze2000z running dual-boot Debian and Windows. I haven't booted to Windows in at least three months. The laptop basically works, though the version of ndiswrapper I have to use for the WiFi seems to cause kernel panics; I haven't had time to diagnose it further. I'm sure the modem doesn't work, but I've never tried it, and I don't really care. Sound does work with ALSA for the most part, but you need a newer version of ALSA than is compiled into the default kernels (I don't know what version is installed with Ubuntu, but I'm running 1.0.8). Sound buttons don't do anything; again, I don't care. ACPI works fine as far as the battery status at least. The Synaptic touchpad driver seems to work well enough, though I could stand to tweak some settings to avoid random mouse clicks. I haven't had time to mess with it yet.
The biggest problem I have is that, even for Linux, 256 MB is insufficient for what I want to do sometimes. I really wish I'd spent the extra money on more memory. Certain programs that I unfortunately need to use on occasion (*cough*acroread*cough*) can be real memory hogs.
The real point, though, is that I have a rather functional Debian system on my laptop.
But do note that java-package, in the contrib section, enables installation of Sun (or Blackdown or IBM) Java as a Debian package. You still have to download from Sun and go through the license agreements, though, but it's still somewhat better than installing manually.
I've come to like musikCube for a Windows player and indexer. It finds files automatically if you give it the directory and, if the files are tagged correctly, you get a decent search it seems. I don't have that much music ripped to my computer, though, so I don't know how it handles larger collections for sure, but it looks promising. (The support for FLAC is what made me download it in the first place.)
I would like to set up a hard drive on my dedicated Linux box with my entire music collection in FLAC format, then set it up as an SMB share so that I can access all my music over WiFi from wherever in the house. I teach music lessons, and this would be really handy if, during a lesson, I thought of a recording I wanted to play for my student and I had my laptop there. (Organizing/cataloging my CD collection would be another alternative, but not nearly as interesting.) Might be a summer project for me. I have come to like abcde as a ripper. Under Linux, be sure to turn off cdparanoia if you ever want the ripping process to finish (link isn't using abcde, but the reasoning is the same, and cdparanoia options can be specified in the config file for abcde).
Slashdot Mirror
Like this?
I just got home from practicing for six and a half hours for a doctoral degree recital I am performing tomorrow. I could have just put together a video instead. I'm sure I would get an A from the committee if I did!
(I'd like to send a special shout out to Karlheinz Stockhausen for writing pieces that have to be performed from memory but are next to impossible to memorize, such as In Freundschaft. Thanks so much!)
Oh, and if any of you folks are in Minneapolis tomorrow (Wednesday, December 13), be at Ultan Hall on the University of Minnesota campus (in the Ferguson Hall building) at 3:45 p.m. to witness the carnage. Thanks!
Does this exploit affect opening .doc files in OpenOffice.org?
From the article:
Huh? What is this, and why would it make any difference whatsoever in preventing exploits?
I recall in elementary school, in a unit on inventions, being told of a local inventor who patented some sort of braille tab that could be attached to bills with the intent that banks would add and remove these tabs for blind people. The reason they were not successful was exactly what you described -- the device was deemed unnecessary because of folding the bills.
(That was long enough ago that I'm almost positive the patent has expired now, for the record.)
I see that the defendant has requested a jury trial, an interesting choice... How likely is some sort of jury nullification, should the case actually go to a jury trial? (Of course, the jury could simply find that the facts support the defendant's case, which is not the same as nullification. How would we know the difference?)
Minor nit-pick here... MIDI is by definition computer-generated, sometimes in response to direct human input (like a human playing a MIDI keyboard, for instance). SmartMusic, for example, takes microphone input from a live performer and "follows" the performer with a predefined accompaniment. If I play my saxophone into the microphone, MIDI is not the result, but the computer can somewhat follow me, so long as I am playing something for which it has an accompaniment program. Recent versions of Finale can supposedly generate such an accompaniment. (I give these products as examples only, not as software I would endorse; for a number of reasons, I really don't care for this company's software.)
The robot in the article, if it is taking input from a microphone, is not directly taking MIDI input.
Some open-source projects have seemed to operate almost entirely on this principle. Take, for instance, LilyPond. Development for some time seemed to be done almost entirely by core developers who seemed to be getting paid for custom features. Spending time on these custom features, though, meant that other, more basic features were sometimes missing or lacking. (I wish I could give examples, but it has been a few months since I have used LilyPond.)
Now, the LilyPond site seems to emphasize the involvement of other developers, documentation writers, etc. There is a FAQ item that leads to a page about sponsoring features, but I wonder if the focus has shifted more toward getting other volunteer contributors. The "call-for-help" page cites these reasons for wanting help:
I would say only the first reason really applies to Debian, but it is interesting that LilyPond seems to be taking the opposite approach to solving the problem.
What about the quality of the video recording? Who exactly is running the camera? (I didn't see it in the article.)
I sat through a taped lecture this morning due to the professor's planned absence. (The students were invited to attend the taping if possible, but it wasn't at a time I could attend -- no big deal.) We had one Monday as well. On Monday, the sound cut out half the time, making the lecture hard to follow. Today, the sound was fine, but if the professor wrote something on the whiteboard and I hadn't had the chance to copy it down entirely (formulae and the like), if the professor moved on to a different part of the board, the camera followed and sometimes never returned to the other part of the board. That made the tape much more useless than intended.
The twist here is that, thanks to a distance education program, all lectures are recorded and are available to us at no charge online after a ten day delay. The problem with that is that ten days can quite often be after relevant homework or exams happen. So, in ten days, I could go online to get the formulae that I did not quite capture. (Or, I could ask the professor or TA, I'm sure.) The quality of the taping matters, though. Does the professor in the article have a money-back guarantee on the service?
OK, you might not have the machines to pull this one off (though you can get them for next to nothing if you know where to look, or perhaps try an emulator). One nice thing about this idiom is the ease with which the low-res graphics can be manipulated; the kids can draw some crude pictures.
I'm serious, by the way. It's really easy to learn a few fundamental commands in Applesoft. I remember doing this in a class in probably fifth grade, and everyone seemed to like it. (I already knew how to program in the language, so I didn't necessarily learn much.) No compiler; just type RUN and you're good to go.
Her flute? You couldn't ask for an instrument easier to inspect or to fit into an overhead compartment or under a seat (neither of which might be ideal anyway -- turbulence, etc.). She didn't seriously have to check the thing, did she?
Common sense on the part of baggage screeners might be a good thing...
I recall reading research (though I do not recall where) that suggested that study of a string instrument (violin, etc.) must be commenced by the age of 11 or 12 for the student to have any chance at all of reaching the upper echelons of mastery of the instrument. It had something to do with neurological factors related to the tactile sense of the hands, particularly the left hand. 11 or 12 is rather late to be starting a string instrument, by many accounts, but school orchestras generally start by then. I realize that this issue is basically physical rather than mental, but it is an example of age being a relatively short time limit for something.
There's no way I would check a laptop due to the potential for physical damage. I've never tried that, but I had the experience almost a decade ago of sitting on an airplane in Atlanta on the return trip from a music tour to Europe. We had to check larger instruments (including my saxophone) given the amount of other stuff we needed. The baggage handlers were doing things like opening cases and playing instruments while we watched, in horror, out the window. Of course, they were not particularly careful in handling the luggage either, and nearly everyone had damage to get repaired when we made it home. I was lucky enough to escape with only a $30 repair for a bent key rod. Most laptops anymore are fairly rugged, but even if reasonably well-packed (knowing good and well that you'll probably have to unpack your bag for security screening), I cannot see most laptops surviving that kind of handling.
While Intel's gaffe is possibly the most famous, consider this tidbit from Applesoft Basic:
Granted, this was a software implementation bug, not a hardware bug. (I don't recall the exact precision of the response, but it was something of that nature.)
I teach guitar, among lots of other instruments and voice. Every so often, someone wants to learn some song from tablature, or they come to me only knowing how to read tablature with no acutal experience with regular notation. This is all fine and good -- I can help the student learn notation then -- but I typically point out several limitations of tablature (several of which apply also to chord diagrams, which are not the same thing as tab; a lot of people confuse the two):
I am sure there are other issues as well. That said, I cannot see how shutting down a tablature site benefits the musicians at all; if anything, it encourages recording sales.
While the recording artist could potentially be disappointed with other musicians' inferior performances of their tunes, anyone in the U.S. can record and sell an original rendition of anything that has already been recorded, thanks to compulsory mechanical licensing, whether the original artist likes it or not. Of course, few amateurs are going to be able to pull off any kind of publishable album, but with the ubiquity of computerized recording tools (ProTools, etc.), it's not hard to make independent CD's anymore. Not that anyone but friends and family will buy them...
Yes. Live orchestral music in living rooms is so last-century. And German.
(I know most of you won't be able to open that link, but Wikipedia doesn't have it and I couldn't find another reasonable source. My apologies.)
Interesting. My concept of recent video game music is more like film music, but with more possibilities due to non-linearity. It should be possible to have a very effective soundtrack without huge "forces" (composers refer to the number of performers required to perform a composition in this manner) with a more reasonable budget. This soundtrack would not necessarily be among the greatest ever, but it might be more effective than a commercial music ripoff.
One of my life goals is to, at some point, write and produce a video game score. I never seem to have enough time to do it; I was trying last summer to find an open-source game that I was sure would actually be produced, but even then, it really wasn't a project for which I could do justice in a summer. Once I'm not in school anymore in three years or so, I might be interested in a commercial video game project, if someone was willing to hire someone with "only" a bachelor's degree in composition. (I'm a doctoral student in performance. Hey, maybe I could even play on the soundtrack.)
Was there a point to this post? Probably not. This is Slashdot, after all. But if there was a point, it would be that creativity might help with budget issues, enabling more video games to have quality music.
Typically, you can get additional money added to your aid eligibility (for subsidized loans, etc.) one time for a computer purchase. Check with your financial aid department if that interests you.
There is now a postscript to the article:
So the mouse pad can be found elsewhere cheaper. Thanks so much for telling us where. For that matter, there is an ideal price for a mouse pad? I thought that was roughly 0 euros.
IIS 6.0 Resource Kit Tools has an application called SelfSSL.exe that does everything for you to self-sign a certificate in IIS. It does work in IIS 5.1 as well (I used it last week) under WinXP. It was definitely possible before to self-sign a certificate in IIS, but this tool makes it a lot easier.
Billions in click fraud? That sure doesn't compare with that $90 million class-action "settlement" for which I received notice the other day (including $30 million in attorney's fees). And, of course, other than the attorney's fees, it's all in advertising credits.
Yeah, I'll be opting out of this one.
This question is interesting in light of claims in television campaign ads by Chet Culver, who is running for the Democratic nomination for governor of Iowa, that he will create a Silicon Valley in Iowa. There's some sound bite in there about creating tech jobs to keep "bright" kids in Iowa. For some reason I can't figure out, he's apparently leading the polls for the primary.
For all kinds of reasons that have already been posted, I don't buy it. Chet, you're not the original poster, are you? Just now doing research?
(Unfortunately, if he wins the primary, I will end up voting for him for governor anyway. Ick.)
I am posting from an HP Pavilion ze2000z running dual-boot Debian and Windows. I haven't booted to Windows in at least three months. The laptop basically works, though the version of ndiswrapper I have to use for the WiFi seems to cause kernel panics; I haven't had time to diagnose it further. I'm sure the modem doesn't work, but I've never tried it, and I don't really care. Sound does work with ALSA for the most part, but you need a newer version of ALSA than is compiled into the default kernels (I don't know what version is installed with Ubuntu, but I'm running 1.0.8). Sound buttons don't do anything; again, I don't care. ACPI works fine as far as the battery status at least. The Synaptic touchpad driver seems to work well enough, though I could stand to tweak some settings to avoid random mouse clicks. I haven't had time to mess with it yet.
The biggest problem I have is that, even for Linux, 256 MB is insufficient for what I want to do sometimes. I really wish I'd spent the extra money on more memory. Certain programs that I unfortunately need to use on occasion (*cough*acroread*cough*) can be real memory hogs.
The real point, though, is that I have a rather functional Debian system on my laptop.
But do note that java-package, in the contrib section, enables installation of Sun (or Blackdown or IBM) Java as a Debian package. You still have to download from Sun and go through the license agreements, though, but it's still somewhat better than installing manually.
I've come to like musikCube for a Windows player and indexer. It finds files automatically if you give it the directory and, if the files are tagged correctly, you get a decent search it seems. I don't have that much music ripped to my computer, though, so I don't know how it handles larger collections for sure, but it looks promising. (The support for FLAC is what made me download it in the first place.)
I would like to set up a hard drive on my dedicated Linux box with my entire music collection in FLAC format, then set it up as an SMB share so that I can access all my music over WiFi from wherever in the house. I teach music lessons, and this would be really handy if, during a lesson, I thought of a recording I wanted to play for my student and I had my laptop there. (Organizing/cataloging my CD collection would be another alternative, but not nearly as interesting.) Might be a summer project for me. I have come to like abcde as a ripper. Under Linux, be sure to turn off cdparanoia if you ever want the ripping process to finish (link isn't using abcde, but the reasoning is the same, and cdparanoia options can be specified in the config file for abcde).