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Music

Detecting Click Tracks 329

jamie found a blog entry by Paul Lamere, working for audio company Echo Nest, in which he experiments with detecting which songs use a click track. Lamere gives this background: "Sometime in the last 10 or 20 years, rock drumming has changed. Many drummers will now don headphones in the studio (and sometimes even for live performances) and synchronize their playing to an electronic metronome — the click track. ...some say that songs recorded against a click track sound sterile, that the missing tempo deviations added life to a song." Lamere's experiments can't be called "scientific," but he does manage to tease out some interesting conclusions about songs and artists past and present using Echo Nest's developer API.
Science

Scientists Create Compound With a Single Element 163

rocketman768 writes "An international team of researchers including scientists at the Carnegie Institution has discovered a new chemical compound that consists of a single element: boron. Chemical compounds are conventionally defined as substances consist of two or more elements, but the researchers found that at high pressure and temperature pure boron can assume two distinct forms that bond together to create a novel 'compound' called boron boride."
Bug

Hope For Fixing Longstanding Linux I/O Wait Bug 180

DaGoodBoy writes "There has been a long standing performance bug in Linux since 2.6.18 that has been responsible for lagging interactivity and poor system performance across all architectures. It has been notoriously difficult to qualify and isolate, but in the last few days someone has finally gotten a repeatable test case! Turns out the problem may not even be disk related, since the test case triggers the bug only by transferring data either between two processes or threads. The test results are very revealing. The developer ran regressions all the way back to version 2.6.15 that demonstrate this bug has more than doubled the time to run the test in 2.6.28. Many, many people working at improving the desktop performance of Linux will be very happy to see this bug die. I know that I, personally, will find a way to send the guy that found this test case his beverage of choice in thanks. Please spread the word and bring some attention to this issue so we can get it fixed!"

Comment Re:The source was out there for years! (Score 1) 387

IcedTea's plugin is worthless. It doesn't deal with signed applets.

The only two things I use java for with a web browser are two different types of network kvm. One uses a java applet, and the other uses a java webstart application. I had to use 32bit sun java to get support for both at once.

Now the only thing left 32bit is mplayer for win32 codecs. I will have to do much testing and see if I can now live without them and use mplayer.x86_64. If so I can pretty much go pure 64bit. I do run into x86_64 applications every so often that don't behave properly. The last example I can think of is rtorrent.

Comment Works! But needs a minor fix (Score 3, Informative) 387

It includes a plugin and javaws support. The two major things sun java 64bit has been lacking for years. It is still lacking the rim.cgi, but I have never had a need for it.

The plugin needs some polish. It doesn't properly declare it's version. Which makes a kvm application I use fail, because it tries to check the version.

Comment Re:The 80s called (Score 1) 584

I have had the same issue with my iPhone. It is especially bad with the original iPhone in that the speaker is much weaker.

Sadly, I was using number@mobile.mycingular.com and switched to number@txt.att.net, after number@mobile.mycingular.com stopped working for a few days. Oddly sometimes number@txt.att.net doesn't come in the single message way.

The reason number@txt.att.net does it the way it does is that it allows the sms server to track individual messages, hence allowing replies.

Portables

Toshiba Launches Laptop With Three GPUs 149

arcticstoat writes to mention that Toshiba's latest line of high-powered laptops has three GPUs included. Both the Qosmio X305-Q706 and Q708 come with an integrated GeForce 9400M for day-to-day processing tasks but have a pair of GeForce 9800Ms in SLI that kick in when you need the extra horsepower. "The [Qosmio] X305-Q706 costs $1,999 US (£1,257) in the US, although we haven't seen any UK pricing on the laptops yet. The system comes with a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 and 4GB of RAM, while the costlier X305-Q708 comes with a quad-core 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9300 CPU."
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - Livejournal brought to its' knees by angry drunk! (valleywag.com)

corewtfux writes: "Breakdowns
A drunk employee kills all of the websites you care about! 365 Main, a datacenter on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District, is popular with Soma startups for its proximity and its state-of-the-art facilities. Or it used to be, anyway, until a power outage took down sites including Craigslist, Six Apart's TypePad and LiveJournal blogging sites, local listings site Yelp, and blog search engine Technorati. The cause? A source close to the company says:

"Someone came in shitfaced drunk, got angry, went berserk, and fucked up a lot of stuff. There's an outage on 40 or so racks at minimum."

Whoever it is, while we like how you roll in theory, in practice, we'd appreciate it if you laid off the servers running websites we actually use."

Programming

Submission + - PHP 5.2.0 Released

pestilence669 writes: PHP 5.2.0 Released

[02-Nov-2006] The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.2.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features, bug fixes and security enhancements. Further details about this release can be found in the release announcement 5.2.0, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog PHP 5.

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