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texel | 11 years ago | on: The Father of the Digital Synthesizer

Not to be that guy, but Massive does FM via the modulation oscillator, though it's only 2 operator FM. Also to continue being that guy, it doesn't actually do FM at all, but Phase Modulation, which is what the DX7 (and later emulations like FM8) also use.

texel | 12 years ago | on: SoundCloud Raises $60 Million at $700 Million Valuation

They've got fairly aggressive automated systems for identifying and flagging material that's registered with rights-management agencies. It works for both individual tracks and material featured in mixes. I've even had my own music taken down preemptively before since the label had already registered the forthcoming track. I was able to fill out a form with some personal info and they put it back up pretty quickly, but it was still annoying (though I completely understand why they have it set up that way).

Not sure how other people are confounding the detection algorithms. They're even resilient to changes in pitch. As a result, a lot of DJs I know can no longer post mixes to soundcloud and have to use other means.

texel | 12 years ago | on: Logic Pro X

Since the later 8.x versions, Live has had a "reduced latency when monitoring" option which allows you to do just that.

texel | 13 years ago | on: How Apple Store Seduces You With the Tilt of Its Laptops

This is anecdotal, and I haven't worked there for close to 5 years, but back when I was at a mall Apple store, our store was clocking more revenue per square foot than any other store in the (upscale) mall. If I remember correctly, it was by a factor of 2 or more. Granted, it was only a 30 foot store, and the items are pretty big ticket anyway, rent there is more expensive etc etc, but all that being said, Apple stores are REALLY good at selling Apple products.

texel | 14 years ago | on: Dizzying but invisible depth

Sort of puts arguments about "leaky abstractions" in the appropriate perspective. Even assembly has a lot of turtles holding it up...

texel | 14 years ago | on: When TDD Fails

I don't like this kind of mocking because usually, I don't care what methods are called internally, I care what the outputs and side effects are. There's almost always a better approach than expectations.

texel | 14 years ago | on: This is what happens when one guy practices art every day for nine years

This is fascinating. I think a really interesting project for someone (other than me) would be to collect each image, and have a whole bunch of people rate each one on a subjective scale from, let's say, 1 to 100. Then, draw a scatter plot of the ratings against time. I wonder what curves might show up? I also wonder whether there are any other datasets that might be used to determine if there's any common thread between learning processes like this.

texel | 14 years ago | on: Intellectual Ventures on This American Life

This is just fantastic- great reporting, and in my opinion it would elicit the appropriate degree of moral outrage in most reasonable listeners. I hope this kind of exposure is at least somewhat helpful at raising people's awareness outside of the software industry echo chamber.

texel | 14 years ago | on: Rails 3.1 HackFest

Not sure if you've ever checked it out, but the seattle.rb meetings on Tuesdays at Vivace on Broadway are usually well attended, and both Aaron Patterson and Eric Hodel are usually there. It's like having a superstar Ruby/Rails team at your fingertips, and everyone is super helpful.

texel | 14 years ago | on: The Capacitive Button Cult Must Be Stopped

Lifetime Seattleite, never had a problem with the rain and capacitive touchscreens. I know I'm just one data point and all that but it's not a common complaint AFAIK.

texel | 15 years ago | on: Everything popular is wrong: Making it in electronic music

This may be partly due to the infamous "dubplate culture" intrinsic to the Drum n' Bass scene, and later the Dubstep scene. Back in the late 90s it wasn't uncommon for certain gigantic tracks to exist as exclusive dubplates given to only top-name DJs for a couple of years before their eventual release... tracks like Bad Company's "The Nine" being a prime example (Prototype was a label notorious for this kind of hype-building tactic).

These days, the tools and techniques of DJing have been largely demystified, so DJs and producers trade in a currency of unreleased tracks, otherwise there's precious little to differentiate their sets from those played by any number of technically qualified local DJs.

texel | 15 years ago | on: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

That's exactly the point- since they're holding off on upgrading their OS, potentially for a much longer time, they won't even have the option of updating their web browser. An OS upgrade is a much more monumental decision than a browser upgrade, and the inertia is much greater.

At any rate, the fact that IE9 can't backport parts of its OS dependencies is kind of an implementation detail. We're saying Webkit has no problems providing a self-contained modern browsing experience, so IE9 doesn't have to be any different.

texel | 15 years ago | on: Confessions of an Apple Store Employee

Honestly, nothing too crazy. What drove me nuts as a Mac Genius was the opaqueness of the engineering and support organization- we were on the front lines diagnosing and fixing customer issues, and we could do escalations, but it was still hard to get any answers from higher up that weren't already in the official docs. I'm sure there's other stuff I'm forgetting, but overall it wasn't a terrible place to work considering it's retail.
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