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Comment: Re:MuseScore? (Score 2) 299

by lasinge (#46089183) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: An Open Source PC Music Studio?
I've been using lilypond for years and find it actually very nice for quick and dirty ... once you figure it out and have set up an initial format for whatever you want. The learning curve is steep - it is essentially a scripting language for music, somehow related to LaTex. It took about 50 hours to do my first 3 lead sheets, now I can crank one out in about 15 minutes. Frescobaldi is a nice way of dealing with lilypond, it is sort of an IDE for lilypond with a panel for viewing your pdf while you work on the code. On the other hand, I just checked out musescore and I like being able to play the notes on a midi keyboard with one hand and adjusting note values with the left... it will export to lilypond format as well (but not back).

Comment: Re:Ascent-descent patterns do repeat (Score 1) 234

by lasinge (#37955416) Attached to: Mathematically Pattern-Free Music
There is a natural cohesion to it nonetheless which comes from the fact that they are always muliplying by a power of 3 to get to the next note, unless you jump off the end and start again so to speak. When you consider that there are 12 separate and distinct notes, interesting things happen in music when you divide the notes (chromatic scale to be specific) symmetrically and is a widely understood phenomenon, and gives rise to many of the patterns you hear in music. 3 into 12 is possibly the most versatile of them all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Slonimsky

There is definitely a harmonic pattern, and this music by no means is pattern free, just that they don't play the same note twice. Interesting but a false premise. If it were played with an even tempo the patterns would emerge even more. It could easily be made more ugly, try overlapping some of the notes in another sort of pattern for one, like running two different sequences at the same time, or even varying the durations then we'd see ugly, and that's just for starters. The ugliest piece of music, bah.

Comment: Re:Curious if there's any informed people here... (Score 2) 667

by lasinge (#37954814) Attached to: Fee Increase Attempt Inspires 'Dump Your Bank Day'
Wait a minute, banks LOSING money? Come on son, which financial institution are you working for? What desert island have you been living on for the past two months? That's like all the money you supposedly SAVE when you buy something from your local shyster used car salesman. That's the biggest pile of horse nitrogenous compounds I've ever heard. The banks did more to shoot themselves in the foot by lending bogus loans and bundling them and reselling them as financial instruments, laughing all the way to the ... errr wait. Seriously? We are talking about enough money lost to equal the whole economy for one year of the whole planet!! And then lobby to get the money from the US government. This has always pissed me off about banks, they hold on to 10% of your money make money hand over fist with YOUR money and charge YOU fees for their trouble. They should be paying you for the privilege of making money from your money. That's why the kids are Occupying Wall Street, that's why. To quote Matt Taibbi .... oh never mind. Go stroke your gold bullion or something. "My precious, my precious..."

Comment: Re:Cash for absolutely everything? No. (Score 1) 667

by lasinge (#37954668) Attached to: Fee Increase Attempt Inspires 'Dump Your Bank Day'
That's great and all, but when I go to my "local" electronics store in Marin county to buy piezo tweeters for my keyboard amplifier and they are damn near $30 and I can get the same ones online for a couple of bucks, well... and they blow after about a month. I know I need to update the electronics, will do it soon - but still. I know they have crazy overhead, but isn't that also a function of the cost of renting commercial space which goes back to the mortgage problem?

Comment: Re:Not a good public rep (Score 1) 311

by lasinge (#37925926) Attached to: Julian Assange Loses Extradition Appeal
So you form your opinion based on what you watch on TV? I know CNN is not Fox, but neither is Democracy now. I'd say on that spectrum, CNN is closer to Fox. One of the charges that the OWS people are saying is that the M$M is lying to us left and right, and if you choose to entertain that notion for even one second you must logically deduce that trying to understand the movement through the eyes of its enemies is indeed impossible to achieve.

Go to one, talk to people there. Yes you will find drum beating hippies, yes you will find incoherence, but what is not widely seen on TV is that you will also find incredibly articulate mostly (but not all) young people who are not apathetic and want to make some changes in the world to make it a better place, and are willing to get off the couch and do something about it. That should make you wonder about the common narrative of youth today. If you cannot do that for whatever reason (not local enough, home responsibilities whatever) You can actually see a lot of it live online through livestreaming. Youtube also has a lot of information. At least try to see the narrative through the eyes of the people who are making the statement and not the detractors before making your opinion.

Or you could vote, or you could contact your representative. I did it this week, I tried to fit my concerns into a 2000 *character* limit box on my state representative's website. Not big enough, so I called asking for an email address and was told, that (s)he was too busy for that. Huh? Upon further pressing I was told by the staffer that I could fax and he gave me a fax number. I'm guessing that's a dead letter office right there. Either that or they compile all the faxes into stacks and then process all the info that way (which a staffer from another office told me that's how they do it.) Faxes? Are you kidding me? So the state instead of using email and search capabilities etc. etc. (grep anyone?) instead chooses to use dead trees to compile reams of concerns? At the cost of the taxpayers. Again why should I be surprised, it's gubment after all - but why is that to be tolerated? That's the point here, so many things are broken and people have let it slide for far too long.

Comment: Re:Journalists and Math (Score 1) 94

by lasinge (#37925456) Attached to: Angry Birds Downloads Pass Half-Billion Mark
bridgekeeper: What is the velocity of a sparrow in flight?
Brian: African or American?
bridgekeeper: I dunno? Aaaaaaaaaah, (flies into the abyss....)

Isn't a billion a different amount (million is different I'm pretty sure) on the American side of the pond than on the European? 500,000,000 is a half billion in American terms.

Comment: Re:Point gun at foot. SHOOT! (Score 2) 264

by lasinge (#37924122) Attached to: How X-Ray Scanners Became Mandatory In US Airports
It is exactly that plan, the plan is a long term war of attrition - if anyone in the West would have actually bothered to listen to what {O | U} sama Bean Laiden said was his plan, but then you'd actually have had to get out of your comfort zone and go to AlJazeera's translation for that. His plan was that for every "dollar" the terrorist spends the US (and the West) would spend one million. It is working, at this rate they will drain us before we drain them. I'm not a sympathizer, repeat I realize that he was an enemy, but that is the clear strategy and they even said so. In our zeal to demonize and depersonalize the enemy we lose the ability to *respect* the enemy which is a terrible mistake to make in war. Isn't that from some old book somewhere? Nah, who reads books anymore, it doesn't apply to the old USA we transcend all that and make our own rules. Pride before the fall.

+ - Last major US record label is sold-> 1

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+ - White House Explains Transport-Energy Future->

Submitted by blair1q
blair1q (305137) writes "Today on the White House Blog the President (ok, his staff) released an infographic showing various facts about transportation energy, and how current gas prices need not be so worrisome. Highlights include rapidly increasing domestic production and rapidly decreasing prices for electric-car batteries, requesting congress to shift tax breaks from oil producers to wind/solar/geothermal energy producers, and increasing domestic oil production (yes, there's a paradox there)."
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Data Storage

+ - Writing Linux Kernel Functions In CUDA With KGPU->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Till today, GPGPU computing is a userspace privilege because of NVIDIA's close-source policy and AMD's semi-open state. KGPU is a workaround to enable Linux kernel functionality written in CUDA. Instead of figuring out GPU specs via reverse-engineering, it simply uses a userspace helper to do CUDA related work for kernelspace requesters.
A demo in its current source repository is a modified eCryptfs, which is an encrypted filesystem used by Ubuntu and other distributions. With the accelerated performance of a GPU AES cipher in Linux kernel, eCryptfs can get 3x uncached read speedup and near 4x write speedup on an Intel X25-M 80G SSD(http://code.google.com/p/kgpu/wiki/IozoneBenchmarkResults). However, both GPU cipher based eCryptfs and CPU cipher based one are changed to use ECB cipher mode for parallelism. A CTR, counter mode, cipher may be much more secure, although the real vanilla eCryptfs use CBC mode. Anyway, GPU vendors should think about opening their drivers and computing libraries, at least providing a mechanism to make it easy to do GPU computing inside OS kernel, given the fact that GPUs are so widely deployed and the potential future of heterogeneous operating systems."

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