csmuk

Masons still tend to be well connected in traditional professions if they admit it or not and they do leverage their connection regularly. The appearance I get is that they are downplaying themselves as a "happy little drinking club" rather than a formal organisation.

The basic promise of the masons is that they will always put another mason first. That first means before the law and before ethics.

I've witnessed this (with respect to the law). They can make your life very difficult if they want to so I'm keeping out of their business past the formality.

[1] masons, Eton alumni etc.

I genuinely couldn't honestly recommend one to anyone. MacBook yes, windows laptop yes, iPad yes, ChromeBook no.

Ultimately we are left with an abstraction layer which abstracts nothing because Win32 is the base level abstraction for all the other abstractions now. Metro, WP etc run on top of it all like a massive house of cards throwing 0x80004005 around to piss off devs. If you know the difference between Nt and Zw you'll get what I mean :)

It's all a big shame because the NT native API[1] and NTFS are absolutely flipping marvelous.

Compatibility layers got destroyed by virtualization as well.

Whole emulation layer thing was a bad idea for NT and this as well.

[1] Totally undocumented other than the leaked Windows NT/2000 source code a few years ago.

Triton has assignable knobs and pages and pages of virtual knobs which are trivial to change. If you really want you can stick a MIDI knob box in the back of it and associate those to a virtual control including parameters equivalent to the 808's.

Triton has multiple outs and multiple internal busses. Think of it as a 120 note polyphonic synth with 16 part timbrality, built in rack of effects, built in sequencer, built in sampler and a full size studio mixer and half a hard disk recorder (TBH I use an external DAT because they're bomb proof). Plus it burns and rips CDs and loads Akai samples off floppies and CDs. It's a whole pile of awesome which fits in a flight case.

My rhythm is naff enough that the Triton's sequencer has the resolution to pick it up. If I really want to, which as per you I don't, I can quantize on the device and get it perfect. Then I can assign patterns to keys and play them with my left hand while I hammer out a lead with the right hand.

The big wins are however: rock solid, wonderful documentation, entirely cohesive base system, small, big enterprise features (ZFS, mandatory access control, tracing frameworks, awesome network stack, security, ACL support and better hardware support.

When I say better hardware support, I mean the drivers all work rather better than their Linux counterparts rather than being plentiful and the supported platforms are plentiful and reliable.

I can drag a 17 year old SPARC64 machine out of the cupboard and just use it.

That's simply enough to kill it for me.

That and patchy culture support crudely derived from the CLR where the script will parse/emit dates as 11/12/13 on one host and 12/11/13 on another host based on some random combination of system locale (sometimes even when they're the same!!!) and solar cycles. They managed to make it non portable on the same platform!

Piping objects is a pain as well. You suddenly have a type contract on a pipe which makes things incredibly brittle if you have to refactor anything. Dealing with strings be they delimited or not is considerably easier.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MGUqZp5...

On that basis I agree, because the encounters I've had with PS have been nothing but horrid.

It's slow, obtuse, complicated and unpredictable. cmd+rundll32 was far nicer and that's saying something

We're not in the 80's now and even in the late 80's a workstation was practical (think Korg M1). I mean Oldfield did pretty well with them and an ST.

Access Virus is a rip off. I had a KC and it was no better than a Novation KS6 at a fraction of the cost. Fortunately the scene I was in grew out of the Virus eventually. Not sure about a monotron - horrible sounding feepers. Seem to be trendy but not particularly musical.

I very much doubt many Stradivarius' are actually played. They are like art. The value is subjective. Personally I hate the whining things and would rather use them to smoke some cheese with (this is sarcasm) :)

For me, it's a matter of pragmatism. My Triton sounds pretty good (not too digital) and saves lugging a crap ton of kit around. If it doesn't do something, I'll sample something that does do it and I'm sorted.

NB I was a session keyboardist in the goth/industrial scene for a number of years (also known as unemployed student) so I have some professional experience.

I know someone who milked an obvious patent for the best part of 40 years and made a killing on it. People were paid to get the patent reissued and to chase down manufacturers for pay offs.

The patent (wait for it) was:

"the use of printed circuit boards in television sets".

Fortunately it was allowed to expire about 8 years ago when one of the manufacturers assembled a large legal team to claim prior art.

I'd rather have real kit simply because there is a maintenance overhead for supporting software based solutions. Embedded systems i.e workstations are probably a good midpoint. You can just sit down and play shit then.

However, $1000 for 808 clones is batshit.

I paid less than half that for my Triton Studio which emulates an 808 pretty much spot on with about 20 mins work.

That is true but you only have one thread to synchronise so mutexes and locks are vastly simplified.

Perhaps they're getting the point?

Shared memory (be it shm/heap in same process) with associated mutexes, semaphores, locks and the like is a right pain to get right without introducing race conditions, deadlocks etc.

Go is interesting as it uses "micro threads" (goroutines) and message passing CSP style but I haven't found a use for it yet.

Look at Thailand. You sleep in the rain or turn the remains of your house into a shelter whilst raising the cash. Not only that, people donate some of their cash to the less fortunate.

Only conspicuous consumption (greed) and hoarding of financial assets (by class) restricts our ability to resolve these problems. Simple kindness and social empathy goes a long way.

And yes I am a rampant socialist.

I inherited a Perl CGI and MySQL monster back in 2002 from a Perl monk who unfortunately died. It was a horrific Cthulu-inspired sprawling demon from hell. Little did I know, this is the norm until my third wave of inherited Perl a few years later.

Larger things now push me to Python and I get enough mileage on the smaller things out of the shell and sed/grep/awk. If I want fast stuff, it's a speedup module for Python in C.

I think back fondly of it but I know at the same time it hurt me.

Basically bitcoin removes the bank's ability to derive profit from debt and that's why they're pissed off.

Debt is never a good thing. All it does is facilitate currency flow rather than solve any problems. Inevitably a whole industry appears on the back of that facilitation (banking, finance, insurance etc).

I've moved to iOS for mobile devices as well. Better investment long term, especially considering that I am actually paying for some apps and want them to work for more than a couple of years before I have to argue with the upgrade treadmill.