Thanks for the tip! Alas, the Casio is NOT class-compliant. :(

(p.s. that's another thing they should have addressed - any device using MIDI over USB must be usable without proprietary drivers!)

> (USB being bi-directional)

Not really. USB depends on a central host controlling many dumb devices.

You know what I mean. The host can send signals to the device and vice versa.

> Yes, your USB keyboard uses MIDI too.

Lol! For a second I thought you meant my USB Qwerty keyboard...that would be quite a trick. ^_^

I have a Casio WK-3800 that doesn't have standard MIDI ports (a real pain) and a USB connection. To use it with anything other than a computer would require some kind of interface, and because of USB's host/device architecture it can't be a simple converter box. Since the keyboard is so old there are no up-to-date drivers for it and it's essentially useless as a MIDI device. Great drawbar organ sounds though!

I think they missed an opportunity to switch to USB cabling with MIDI, since MIDI cables are unidirectional. It would be great if MIDI ports became USB ports on all the gear, but allowed backward compatibility through simple adapters with existing MIDI ports.

You'd have to have 2 cables where one would suffice (USB being bi-directional) but it would have saved SO much hassle!

My girlfriend back in 1998 commented on some electronica I was listening to, saying it sounded like "MIDI music."

I tried to explain to her that MIDI doesn't have a sound of its own; the sound she was used to came out of an FM chip on her SoundBlaster card. She just knew that when she clicked on a ".mid" file link, it sounded chintzy.

I wish I was still in touch with her - I'd play her some "MIDI" music from my home studio gear, including old stuff like the JV-1080, E-Mu Proteus 2000, Kurzweil K2500, and Korg TR Rack. It does NOT sound chintzy! :)

If you are proficient in C++, then the other languages in your list are trivial to learn.

On a general level this is largely true, but there's a difference between becoming familiar enough with the language to be productive, and truly understanding the language and learning all of the stuff that's idiomatic to it.

Well, I've been programming in C++ for 20 years, so I haven't really had time to become proficient...but I tend to agree.

Apple had an opportunity to fix this when they first bought the app (SoundJam) from Casady and Green.

Having a song record include a single field for "album" and a single field for "genre" means that a song can never be on more than one album or belong to more than one genre, which is idiotic from a database schema standpoint!

Yes, but GP talking about "Hello, world," which is definitely not relevant to anything substantial! In fact it's pretty much ONLY relevant to educators and newbs.

> What language can you not easily write 'hello world' in?

From the Preface of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist:

"The first example from the text illustrates this point. It is the traditional hello, world program, which in the Java version of the book looks like this:

class Hello {
 
  public static void main (String[] args) {
      System.out.println ("Hello, world.");
  }
}

"in the Python version it becomes:

print "Hello, World!"

"Even though this is a trivial example, the advantages of Python stand out. ... The Java version has always forced me to choose between two unsatisfying options: either to explain the class Hello, public static void main, String[] args, {, and }, statements and risk confusing or intimidating some of the students right at the start, or to tell them, 'Just don't worry about all of that stuff now; we will talk about it later,' and risk the same thing. The educational objectives at this point in the course are to introduce students to the idea of a programming statement and to get them to write their first program, thereby introducing them to the programming environment. The Python program has exactly what is needed to do these things, and nothing more."

Well, I did say "theme" and not "plot device." ^_^

Anyway, my point is that these creatures turn on their creators because of something the creator did, or some flaw in his nature, or simply his incompetence.

As for 2001, I was thinking more of HAL and his imperfections causing the deaths of the crew, not the ape-creatures. HAL is sort of a modern Golem, a symbol of man's hubris.

The cut from the ape throwing the bone in the air to the orbiting nuke is in my mind a way of saying "we are still basically apes hitting each other with sticks; we just learned how to build bigger sticks!"

I find it interesting to consider that Bowman has to destroy HAL as a form of repentance before he is 'worthy' to go through the stargate and evolve beyond his human form.

Thematically, 2001 is really kind of a religious film - to get the most out of it you should be familiar with the Bible and Nietzsche (which you probably will have time to read during the slower bits). ^_^

It's a very old theme, man trying to assume God-like powers and create life, and being corrupt, his corrupt creation turns on him. See: Ex Machina, Frankenstein, 2001, Golem legends...

Inheritance, while not "inherently" bad, is often the wrong solution. See: Why extends is evil

Composition is frequently a more appropriate choice. Aaron Hillegass wrote this funny little anecdote in Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X:

"Once upon a time, there was a company called Taligent. Taligent was created by IBM and Apple to develop a set of tools and libraries like Cocoa. About the time Taligent reached the peak of its mindshare, I met one of its engineers at a trade show. I asked him to create a simple application for me: A window would appear with a button, and when the button was clicked, the words 'Hello, World!' would appear in a text field. The engineer created a project and started subclassing madly: subclassing the window and the button and the event handler. Then he started generating code: dozens of lines to get the button and the text field onto the window. After 45 minutes, I had to leave. The app still did not work. That day, I knew that the company was doomed. A couple of years later, Taligent quietly closed its doors forever."

Dead link. Did you even bother to check it before posting?

Try here: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.htm

I think Hoggy's trolling, poking fun at audiophiles.

The irony is that nowadays, synth snobs pine for that "warm, natural analog sound" and decry digital and VST synths as cold, artificial, and lifeless...exactly the same charges "real" musicians levied at analog synths back in the '60s and '70s.

GIF is laughably outdated - it only supports 256 discrete colors picked from a regular 24-bit color palette in a weak non-lossy compression format.

Depends on how you look at it. It stores 256-color images losslessly. :)

P.S. I always wondered why, since GIF allows multiple images per file (cf. animation frames) why not use them to store 32-bit images by incorporating four 8-bit images for the RGBA channels?

Additional work from martial arts tae kwon do forms.

Yeah, that's why I gave up martial arts. I couldn't stand all the paperwork. :-P