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Media

Submission + - Linux as an OS for music production?

Submitted by Ximogen
Ximogen writes: "You just can't get decent music production tools for anything but Windows and MacOS, and I'll not touch anything from Apple with a bargepole. If you believe otherwise let me know as I'd be interested to find out. I currently use Cubase 4 as my primary music production application along with an extensive library of VST instruments, effects and mastering tools. So any Linux (either open or closed source) alternative would need to support VST2 & VST3"

I included the above comment in a post relating to a different story but it got me thinking. I am a Windows user for many reasons but the most significant reason in recent years is that I've just not been able to find acceptable music production tools for Linux. Given that I'm repeatedly informed by Linux users that Linux is more stable and out-performs Windows on equal hardware AND that I am currently looking to spec a new PC for the sole purpose of music production I thought I might put this to the test.

Unfortunately I fell at the first hurdle, drivers for my E-MU 1820M (E-MU 1010M + IO breakout box + sync daughter card) and given that I don't want to replace a perfectly functional £300+ audio interface that is pretty much where I've got to. Of course £300+ is peanuts compared to the extensive library of VST instruments, effects and mastering tools I've purchased over the years so if the performance benefits of moving to Linux were sufficient and I could utilize my existing library of VSTs I would consider new audio hardware.

While talking of hardware the new PC is likely to be built around an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz CPU on an Intel DP965LT motherboard.

Am I barking up the wrong tree here? Is there likely to be enough of a performance difference to give any practical benefit? Does anyone out there use Linux for music production?

Any thoughts or recommendations gratefully received!
Math

Submission + - Mathematicians finally map 57-dimensional shape

Submitted by
Matthew Sparkes
Matthew Sparkes writes: "A team has mapped a 57-dimensional structure called E8 and the results take up 60 gigabytes of data. The shape, called E8 (pronounced E-eight), is a Lie group. A Norwegian mathematician invented Lie groups in the 19th century to study symmetry. A Lie group underlies objects like balls, cylinders or cones that are symmetrical when rotated by small amounts. The team solved the problem in a four-year project using a supercomputer at the University of Washington in Seattle."
GUI

Submission + - Vista's desktop ... based on KDE 3.x?

Submitted by
TihSon
TihSon writes: "Recently I had a chance to play with Microsoft's latest OS, and I would like to hear some feedback on an observation. In the past the KDE project has taken flak because some claim it is too 'Windows'. While playing with Vista though I had the distinct impression that this time it was M$ who was doing the copying. Bluntly put, I felt that the look ... but not necessarily the functionality ... of Vista's desktop was basically a greased up KDE clone. Has anyone else felt this way, or am I simply falling victim to a gradual case of fanboy-itus?"
PHP

Submission + - PHP5 and adding XSLT to the DOM and SimpleXML

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: PHP5 offers the developer a lot more muscle to work with XML. New and modified extensions such as the DOM, SimpleXML, and XSL make working with XML less code intensive. This article looks at input and output options, and you will learn how to use the Yahoo Web Services REST protocol interface to provide a more sophisticated showcase for the functionality of the DOM and SimpleXML extensions and concludes with the XSL extension.
Robotics

Submission + - Urbi for Mindstorm NXT programming

Submitted by
JC Baillie
JC Baillie writes: "Hi, You might have heard of URBI, an easy to use programming interface for robotics, which has been used so far on the Aibo. I thought you might be interested to know that we have released a version of URBI for Lego Mindstorms NXT. You can find more information here: http://www.gostai.com/nxt URBI is free, with open source interfaces, and you don't have to change the original firmware to use it. We have a forum also to discuss technical matters here: http://forum.gostai.com/viewforum.php?f=16 Let me know what you think about it, Best Regards, JC Baillie"
Debian

Ian Murdock: Debian "Missing a Big Opportunity" 330

Posted by Hemos from the tsk-tsk-tsk dept.
Natester writes "While Debian struggles to get its next release (Etch) out the door, the project's founder, Ian Murdock, has spoken out about politics, the lack of firm leadership, and Ubuntu's meteoric rise in prominence. Murdock believes that Debian is "process run amok" — nobody feels empowered to make decisions, leading to the sluggish rate of progress."
Linux Business

Submission + - iPhone gives rise to Mainstream Embedded Linux Cel

Submitted by
warcriminal
warcriminal writes: "Linux based cell phones are getting a second look and the source of this look by the industry is a stranger than fiction story — the iPhone. The iPhone is driving the resurgence of the Embedded Linux Cell Phone and PDA as a viable alternative. http://www.goitexpert.com/entry.cfm?entry=iPhone-g ives-rise-to-Mainstream-Embedded-Linux-Cell-Phones "
Math

E8 Structure Decoded 127

Posted by Hemos from the get-it-down-on-paper dept.
arobic writes "A group of mathematicians from US and Europe succeeded in mapping the E8 structure, an example of a Lie group. These were developed by the well-known mathematician Sophus Lie (pronounce Lee) in the last century and are used for many applications, mainly in theoretical physics. This is an important breakthrough as it could help physicists working on Grand Unified Theories (aka GUTs)."
Space

Submission + - Mars Rover Churns Up Yellow Soil

Submitted by
SeaDour
SeaDour writes: "Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are taking a closer look at images sent back by the Mars rover Spirit nearly a year ago, showing bright yellow soil that had been churned up by the rover's wheels. The soil appears to contain high concentrations of sulfur as well as traces of water. "This material could have been left behind by water that dissolved these minerals underground, then came to the surface and evaporated, or it could be a volcanic deposit formed around ancient gas vents," said Dr. Ray Arvidson. Researchers are planning to see if the soil turns up anywhere else in the area, potentially giving more clues as to its origin."
Novell

Submission + - Your Linux is Ready -- Open Enterprise Seminar Lin

Submitted by
James Gosling
James Gosling writes: "Your Linux is Ready — Open Enterprise Seminar

Your Linux is Ready — Open Enterprise Seminar

On the 14th I attended the 'Your Linux is Ready Roadshow' in Edinburgh. It was an early start, I caught a lift of a fellow techie from a neighbouring campus. Takes about 2 hours from Carlisle to Edinburgh and we were there in excellent time, 9am registration for a 9.30am start.

This is part of Novells big push of Enterprise Linux on the desktop and server. They had a series of speakers including short talks from IBM and AMD. We were given a demonstration of Xen virtualisation on Novells SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, this was interesting and clarified a few things for me. I had just begun playing with Xen and was scratching my head a bit, the key thing it helped me understand was that with Xen you can create paravirtualised server instances for operating systems that support this functionality, but if you want to create full virtual machines without the para support (i.e. for OS's that don't support paravirtualisation) then you need a processor with this support at the hardware level. Because of the cooperation between Microsoft and Novell we could be assured that future Microsoft operating systems would be able to be run in paravirtualisation on Xen. We were shown how easy and fast it was to switch a virtual machine from one physical server to another, dependent of course on shared storage, in this case OCFS (Oracle Clustered File System) on an iSCSI host. I know from my self-study that the switch from one server to another takes less than 300 milliseconds, which is pretty impressive. They went on to configure high availability using Heatbeat2, making the virtual machine switch rather than clustering the applications, which was pretty enlightening!

The odd pop at Microsoft was made, which was only to be expected, but Microsoft bashing was not the basis of their pitch which I was pleased to see (not that I have any great love of Microsoft you understand).

We were shown OpenOffice and in particular the emphasis here was on showing it as a really viable alternative in a world where documents and spreadsheets etc were still likely to have originated or need to go into Microsoft Office products. I think one grey area is Microsoft Access compatability which we queried the experts about, but the answers we got didn't quite tally.

I was very interested in AppArmour, I'd heard it mentioned but had never quite understood what it did until now. It allows you to armour-plate your apps by packaging them within apparmour. Apparmour then restricts the applications interaction with your environment. A little bit like a snapshot a demo was shown were an application was run whilst what it accessed was monitored then the details of this were shown and wildcards substituted as necessary for some elements of the rules identified. These rules were then applied, for example restricting what areas of the filesystem an application could access. Working in an educational environment I could see real benefits.

Pushing SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) was probably the principle focus of the day, and what we were shown of it was very impressive. It was the little things, the useability features like switching between desktops and the coolness stuff like wobbly windows and stretchy icons showing miniature previews of your documents. May all sound silly but for the end user these are the kinds of things that win them over!

We cornered one of the Zenworks experts later and queried him about the kind of support know offered for locking down SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop). We explained that in an educational environment heavily locking down was important. I currently use the Novell Application Launcher as shell in our classrooms and we make heavy use of the Zenworks Dynamic Local User policy and user orientated Group Policies to lock down our Windows XP desktops. He explained that at the moment the Zen functionality for locking down Linux is geared around workstations not users, but that user orientated workstation restrictions were in the pipeline. For us this does give us some reservations about rolling it out in classrooms just now. One of the principal problems we would face also in any switch to a Linux desktop is the massive number of Windows specific applications, students current have access to approx. 300 applications! We agreed that in an office environment where maybe only a few key apps were windows specific and through the use of Wine (a utility that allows Windows apps to be run on Linux) or even Virtual Machines the move would look very attractive.

We were given a sneak preview of some of the new functionality in Zenworks that will be being announced at Brainshare — so if I told you.... I'd have to kill you, either that or Novell would despatch someone to deal with us both! It's funny but that was the one part of the demo where I found myself thinking.... what, its all changed.... aaaaggghh! Rather than..... how wonderful... I think the pace of change just took my breath away a little.

We had a short demo of Zenworks Asset Management, which we don't currently run, but hope to implement shortly — it handles software license compliance and hardware auditing. Also demo'd was Zenworks Patch Management, which looked really good.... all the more for a painful experience I had recently with WSUS, the Windows Update server (worthy of a blog entry all of its own!).

There was talk about future Zenworks capability for managing virtual machines from Vmware, Xen and Microsoft — this will be interesting to see. With the rush for virtualisation some of the management tools around fall short currently for this kind of environment.

We had a talk on Sentinel a fairly recent addition to their arsenal, its all to do with compliance and policing that compliance — the discussion was necessarily quite abstract, its a very big area.

AMD talked about the latest generations of processors and about heat and power becoming big issues in the datacenter, not just raw processor power. Of course virtualisation and the hardware level functions to support this were discussed. AMD wanted to make it clear that they had been involved with SUSE in ensuring total compatability since the year dot. Similarly IBM pushed its Linux friendly credentials explaining how they had centres around the globe with, I think it was 7000, Linux engineers! They had some serious people power dedicated to the open source community, the scale of the thing was impressive. Of course IBM support SUSE across their range and the can deliver a stack ready to go — the hardware, software and support. I could see the attraction, they had substituted Apache with IBM Websphere and MySQL for IBM DB2 and their pitch was centred at scalability — basically put this stack in now and you'll be able to grow into larger capacity.

The day ended at around 4pm, so we were back in Carlisle with our goodie bags around 6pm. I'll post a photo on my new SUSE/Novell cuddly toy... go get yours!

The next date for the tour is in Helsinki on 20th, the next UK date is the 22nd in Leeds. It's worth checking out. You'll find some useful links below to find information on this event and others worldwide, plus more on their Linux products and the Microsoft/Novell working relationship. Fellow geeks should checkout the free evaluation downloads, particularly openSUSE, it's FREE!

Your Linux is ready: And it's on the road right now.
http://www.novell.com/linux/tour_emea/

Novell Global Events Calendar
http://www.novell.com/events/calendar

Linux Enterprise Downloads
http://www.novell.com/linux/download_linux.html

openSUSE 10.2
http://www.novell.com/products/opensuse/

Novell and Microsoft — Building Bridges
http://www.moreinterop.com/"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft 'bribes' companies to use Live Search

Submitted by Blahbooboo3
Blahbooboo3 writes: As reported by ITWire here,with a tiny 6.76% of the search market, compared with Google's 60%+ search share dominance, Microsoft has decided it's time to leverage their massive base of global Windows users with juicy wads of cash to switch search providers! Microsoft rewarding its corporate clients if they manage to convince their employees to use Live Search instead of other search engines, and plans to share Live Search-related profits with humanitarian organizations with a new program called "Microsoft Service Credits for Web Search." More info here about the bribery. Nothing like paying off the boss to get to the people!
Google

Google Snaps Up Stats Tool from Swedish Charity 106

Posted by Zonk from the at-least-he's-rich-in-spirit dept.
paulraps writes "A stats program that began as a teaching aid for a university lecture has just been bought by Google for an undisclosed sum. The statistics tool, Trendalyzer, was developed by a professor and his son at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute. Unfortunately for the developers, the project has been run under the auspices of a charity, Gapminder, and financed over the last seven years by public money. Maybe that seemed smart at the time, but the professor, admitting that he won't see a dime of Google's cash, now seems regretful. As for what Google has purchased: 'Public organizations around the world invest 20 billion dollars a year producing different kinds of statistics. Until now, nobody has thought of collecting all the information in the same place. That should be possible with Trendalyzer, which will be able to present that quantity of data in a clear way as well as giving the user the ability to compare many different kinds of information.'"
Music

Submission + - Open Source model applied to sheet music?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: As an amateur composer and pianist, I frequently see music that I would like to change or rewrite as a personal interpretation of the writer's intent. Although I love to make modifications and change the way a piece is written, it is obviously impossible for me to claim any such a hybrid as my own work, nor as the original author's. Perhaps could a model similar to the open source software movement's be used to collaboratively create music among an array of composers, each adding their own personal thoughts? Admittedly, it would be difficult for many composers to agree on what sounds best, but I imagine similar difficulties are involved in creating open source software. I would love to see composers making music under the GPL, so that many others could do this, but I am not sure if such a model would work.

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