Heh.

It can be funny how often the people who make up bogus grammatical rules and try to enforce them will often unknowingly violate the pseudo-rules that they're trying to foist on the rest of us. I'd guess that very few people who object to using "gift" as a verb will use "gifted" as an adjective without giving it a thought. I wonder how they'd explain that use of an "-ed" suffix on a word that they've insisted is a noun?

One of my favorite rules about actual English grammar is "Any noun can be verbed." ;-)

(Though actually, there are a few nouns that are difficult to verb, mostly nouns that have no action or relation as part of their meaning. E.g., you have to make up a pretty good shaggy-dog story to set up a valid use of "England" or "America" as a verb. Or do you? I just know someone's going to reply with a totally natural, normal-sounding example ...)

Feeding solar in like that just causes inefficiency, you still need the same level of power generation from other (coal/gas etc) sources on the grid to cope with nights and cloudy days.

Yessirree. Plus, when you use solar energy, it makes baby Jesus cry. We're supposed to get our energy from fossil fuels and fossil fuels alone. That's in the Bible.

And everyone knows we've reached the limits of technological advance. We'll never be able to get any power from the Sun.

If you want an example of how superior a great, muscular fossil fuel burning country is to a weeny little sun using country, just look at how much better the US economy is doing compared to Germany. At least we were doing better until that Marxist bastard Obama gave us socialized medicine. Now we're going to have an inferior health care system like Germany does.

And don't tell me about the Germans. They're only able to make use of solar power because of godless government subsidies, (and government subsidies really make Baby Jesus cry), and anyway Germans don't really use energy the way Americans do. They've got fruity little solar panels and fruity little cars and nothing like the mighty industrial economy of the U.S. of A. which runs on the juice we squeeze from the ground like the great manly Colossus that we are.

ProTools is so unbelievably lock-in, expensive, and closed, that I can't believe any open source proponent of anything would even touch it.

Can it load a DXi plugin?

About once a year, I make another run at an all open source music project. I try to support Ardour and many other open source DAW and audio-related projects. They're getting closer, but it just isn't quite polished enough yet to be able to establish a nice workflow and produce a really refined end result. I hope it will get there, though.

Now, there's a good chance that a lot of my inability to use Ardour and a fully-OSS music workstation is because I'm just not that good with Linux. I get flummoxed trying to get my audio interfaces and MIDI controllers working properly, I get hung up on little things that I don't have to think about on Windows or OSX.

I absolutely want at least one Linux machine in my setup though. Using Rea-Mote to off-load effects processing and rendering and other processor-intensive tasks is something I can't work without. I no longer have to fret about having half a dozen convolution reverbs and 20 instances of Waves limiters and compressors popping in and out any more. Because of my Linux box(es) I don't even think about limitations any more. So, there's a place for Linux in my studio, but not as my main production workstation yet.

As I'm not an audio engineer, I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to properly mix them down. I know there are levels to be set, times to be synchronized, lefts and rights to be balanced, and probably a dozen other things that a trained ear would do that I wouldn't know to do, wouldn't know how to do, and as an amateur wouldn't do well. Even if I were to spend a few hours to get audio output from all these sources somehow mangled into the same pot, it would sound like crap.

At this point I can only sit back and wait for a professional to handle that not-inconsiderable task. So the files themselves aren't worthless, but in this state they're all-but-worthless to me.

ProTools is so unbelievably lock-in, expensive, and closed, that I can't believe any open source proponent of anything would even touch it.

There is no DAW software as good as Cockos Reaper. It is priced so anyone can afford to use it, any VST or DX effect or instrument works in it without a hitch, and it can offload effects processing, rendering, sample streaming etc to a remote Linux box. And when I say "any" VST or DX plugin works great in Reaper, I do mean ANY. VSTi's that are fussy in ProTools or Sonar or Live or Cubase will be smooth as silk in Reaper.

There is no other DAW that comes close. I started with ProTools years ago when there really was nothing else, worked extensively with Logic, and have completed high-level projects in Sonar, Cubase, Ableton Live and others. Nothing compares to Reaper. The community that supports it is more helpful han professional support from any of the other companies.

Also, Reaper will run on practically anything with a processor. 32 bit, 64 bit, Linux, OSX, whatever. I teach some DAW production, and I tell all my students to get Reaper, so any project will work on any platform.

If you have any interest in making music with a digital audio workstation, you can get a fully functioning, non-time limited demo of Reaper for free. I'll bet you end up buying a license ust because it's so good and so worth it.

Now, regarding the MuseScore project with the Bach performances, this is really great news. MuseScore is terrific and mXML is terrific and I'm looking forward to all the future projects that will use these open source recordings as source material.

The fully OSS community hasn't yet put out a really great DAW, but boy, have they ever made an important contribution to the world of making music.

I would love to see projects like the Bach project with other composers. I'd love to see more enlightened contemporary composers embrace this open source approach.

Heh; it's the old "less" vs. "fewer" silliness again.

Consult any math book (that's written in English ;-). The term "less" supplanted "fewer" several centuries back, and "fewer" is only an informal synonym. The term "less (than)" is used in all technical speech for comparing any two real numbers. Similarly, "greater (than)" is used rather than "more (than)" .

You're not only fighting a losing battle; you're fighting one that was lost long before anyone living now was born. Any you're wasting our time commenting on a (semi-)technical "news for nerds" forum on such off-topic nonsense. In a technical setting, "less" is always correct.

Actually, this was alway a bit of bogus peevery. The language historians have documented the interchangable use of "less" and "fewer" going back as far as our language was called "English". And nobody has the legal authority to decree a standard for such things in the common (non-technical) speech, so you actually lost before English even existed. ;-)

So I'm a species bigot. Guess what? That's the advantage of being at the top, and owning the classification system. Until another superior life form comes around and classifies us as vermin, we aren't.

That's not to say we don't have responsibilities to other species. Of course we do. Right now, the responsibility to other species regarding roaches should be "human activity brought non-native roaches across the oceans to become invasive species where they don't belong, so our responsibility is to the native species that are harmed by the roaches. That means we should make every attempt to eradicate roaches."

However, if you really think that humans and roaches should have equal rights, be aware that your only real opportunity is to go join with the roaches, and hope the rest of us don't choke you in a cloud of pesticides. Or you could quit trying to defend really stupid arguments on the interwebz and go volunteer in the community instead, and make a difference to actual suffering humans who need your help.

Assuming that phrase truly is misleading, that pretty much guarantees it will continue to be used. "Misleading" means that someone is benefitting from the improper usage, and they will not willingly give up this tool.

And we know which industry groups love to use this phrase.

There's a quantitative and qualitative difference between roaches and mammals. Roaches are disease carrying pests that indiscriminately destroy resources needed by higher species to survive. There are billions of roaches, with billions more waiting to hatch every day, making eradication impossible. I suspect most roaches die due to competition with other roaches for the limited food they have available. Next, there's always a lifespan issue: everything living dies eventually. Even if you wanted to keep a particular roach alive for five years as a pet, it's not going to make it. So if, in its inevitable death, the cockroach can inspire or teach someone, rather than die under a boot heel, or from a chemical fog, or from another predator, or starvation, or a disease, or of dehydration after being stuck on a glue trap, is that not somehow a "better" death in that it serves a higher purpose?

I personally don't think too highly of plucking the legs off a bug to make them dance for my own amusement, and certainly won't be doing so myself. But I also view cockroaches realistically as harmful pests that ruin (not enhance) ecosystems. I won't be losing any sleep over the deaths of a few extra roaches, no matter how they die.

Create an adblock filter for http://science.slashdot.org./ But if you really intended to block this, you already knew this answer.

A different way would be to create a slashdot account, then go into options, and on the exclusions tab select the Science category. Click save. You won't see them, yet you can get to them when you want. Or maybe you just want to exclude stories from roblimo. Check his box, too.

But much better would be to use your brain. If you don't think a story is interesting, STOP READING IT. Nobody made you come in to this discussion and post about it.