gunix - Slashdot User

How the LSB Keeps Linux One Big Happy Family 171

Posted by Soulskill on Monday September 22, 2008 @05:22PM from the behave-or-i'll-turn-this-distro-around-right-now dept.

blackbearnh writes "The Linux Standard Base is the grand attempt to create a binary-level interface that application developers can use to create software which will run on any distribution of Linux. Theodore Tso, who helps maintain the LSB, talked recently with O'Reilly News about what the LSB does behind the scenes, how it benefits ISVs and end users, and what the greatest challenges left on the plate are. 'One of the most vexing problems has been on the desktop where the Open Source community has been developing new desktop libraries faster than we can standardize them. And also ISVs want to use those latest desktop libraries even though they may not be stable yet and in some ways that's sort of us being a victim of our own success. The LSB desktop has been getting better and better and despite all the jokes that for every year since I don't know probably five years ago, every year has been promoted as the year of the Linux desktop. The fact of the matter is the Linux desktop has been making gains very, very quickly but sometimes as a result of that some of the bleeding edge interfaces for the Linux desktop haven't been as stable as say the C library. And so it's been challenging for ISVs because they want to actually ship products that will work across a wide range of Linux distributions and this is one of the places where the Linux upstream sources haven't stabilized themselves.'"

Using Computers for Sophisticated Music Analysis 97

Posted by Soulskill on Monday September 22, 2008 @04:40PM from the will-it-tell-you-how-bad-you-are-at-guitar-hero? dept.

Tom Avril writes "Need an accompaniment for your melody? Seeking a virtual dancer to try out your new choreography? Or perhaps you're making a new TV commercial, and you need a snippet of music that sounds something like Radiohead, but a bit more mellow. Increasingly, sophisticated software can help with these sorts of tasks. We got a look at the latest from the nascent field of Music Information Retrieval, after its conference in Philadelphia: 'A key part of the conference each year is the announcement of results from a sort of software shoot-out — a competition in which various universities pit their music-analysis algorithms against one another. Entrants from more than a dozen countries competed in 18 tasks, using their computers to "listen" to selections of music, then identify such things as the genre, mood, composer or title. The eventual goal: to help people search for music they might like by combing through millions of audio files in a database. ... In another task, the computer had to identify tunes that someone hummed. "The idea is, you go into the karaoke bar and start humming, and the computer retrieves your song," Downie said.'"

Comment Funny.. (Score 1) 966

by gunix on Saturday September 17, 2005 @06:14PM (#13586815) Attached to: Trigonometry Redefined without Sines And Cosines

He uses a right angle to define spread.

The complaint about redundant information with the suplemental angle is nonsense.
And he limits himself to triangle geometry.

I really doesn't buy that argument about it beeing more natural. Why should I square the pages of a triangle? And he talks about special cases only shortly after complaioing about suplemental angles, and he also adds ac/ob.
And how should young kids learn geometry?
How does he intend to handle circular things?
What the finite fields means is a mystery to me.

The example on page 14,15,16 clearly shows how simple the proposed method is.(irony).
Inaccurate with the classical way? If he did it the classical way without calculating any of the approximate values, like the alpha angle, he would not only find the "mysterical" sqrt(7). He would also find sqrt(2).
Nice though to get the second solution.

Finaly. He's just making a fool out of himself. He complains about the flaws in the classical way, but gladly uses perpendicular things, and other intuitive things.

It might be of interest as a curiosity, nothing else. There is no value in this for calculations unless it handles all the fields where trig things are used.

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