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A Computer Composing and Playing Jazz 134

Posted by timothy on Sunday November 23, 2008 @06:40PM from the jazz?-you-really-are-polite dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has some unusual teaching programs. One PhD student, Øyvind Brandtsegg, is a graduate of the jazz program and this article describes how has developed a computer program and a musical instrument for improvisation. The PhD student is 36 years old and is at the same time a composer, a musician and computer programmer. His 'computer instrument' can take any recorded sound as input and split it into a number of very short sound particles that can last for between 1 and 10 milliseconds. 'These fragments may be infinitely reshuffled, making it possible to vary the music with no change in the fundamental theme.'" Brandtsegg improvisational software is called ImproSculpt; his site contains several selections from his musical output, including "some pieces made with the predecessor of ImproSculpt," called FollowMe.

Review of Stardock's TweakVista 191

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday July 09, 2007 @01:41PM from the needs-all-the-help-it-can-get dept.

mikemuch writes "The new TweakVista utility from Stardock surfaces some of Vista's more obscure settings, giving access to diagnostics and making suggestions for services that you should be running. ExtremeTech's review of TweakVista generally likes the software, and though it's called version 0.9, it is for sale — $19.95 — and feels feature-complete. More suggestions on system optimization, however, would be helpful. From the review: 'According to TweakVista, on July 1st, the "Windows Shell Services DLL service took 651ms longer to shut down than usual." That's nice. Other than this stark presentation, there's no digestible information as to why the shell services DLL took over half a second longer to shut down. And there's no hint as to what to do about it.'"

Comment Re:New Finder... (Score 1) 545

by soricine on Thursday April 12, 2007 @07:44PM (#18711247) Attached to: Apple Delays Leopard to October

I realise it's become something of a trope to complain about it, but the Finder is not terrible.

Most complaints about the Finder centre on network performance (hangs on network disconnections, for example), or on a perception of flawed spatiality. The former is a localised, admittedly serious, problem. The latter is mostly a philosophical difference.

For informed arguments about the problems of the Finder, see:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/finder.ars

http://daringfireball.net/2003/04/siracusa_on_the_ finder

Torvalds Has Harsh Words For FreeBSD Devs 571

Posted by Zonk on Friday April 21, 2006 @01:03PM from the end-of-the-week-frustrations dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In a relatively technical discussion about the merits of Copy On Write (COW) versus a very new Linux kernel system call named vmsplice(), Linux creator Linus Torvalds had some harsh words for Mach and FreeBSD developers that utilize COW: 'I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots. Playing games with VM is bad. memory copies are _also_ bad, but quite frankly, memory copies often have _less_ downside than VM games, and bigger caches will only continue to drive that point home.' The discussion goes on to explain how the new vmsplice() avoids this extra overhead."

America's War on the Web 428

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday April 03, 2006 @04:05PM from the controlling-the-flow-of-information dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Sunday Herald is reporting that while the US is continuing to pursue traditional means of protecting national security, they are also planning to launch a new wave of 'information warfare' to help combat a perceived growing threat of IT security. From the article: 'The Pentagon has already signed off $383 million to force through the document's recommendations by 2009. Military and intelligence sources in the US talk of "a revolution in the concept of warfare". The report orders three new developments in America's approach to warfare [...] the Pentagon says it will wage war against the internet in order to dominate the realm of communications, prevent digital attacks on the US and its allies, and to have the upper hand when launching cyber-attacks against enemies.'"

Telescopes Useless by 2050? 163

Posted by Zonk on Thursday March 02, 2006 @06:21PM from the sad-day-that-will-be dept.

Wellerite writes "Gerry Gilmore, from Cambridge University, has told the BBC that ground-based telescopes will be worthless by 2050. This is due to more and more cloud cover caused by climate change and increasing numbers of aircraft vapour trails. It seems to be time to start preparing to launch more orbit-based telescopes."

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