subject:"Re\: \[fonc\] One more year\?\!"

Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-03-15 Thread Andre van Delft

I like this Process Algebra approach to music:

http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/~bross/research/BrazilSCM95.pdf

And here are some tracks:
http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/~bross/research/LMJ/

Op 23 jan. 2012, om 06:17 heeft BGB het volgende geschreven:

> On 1/22/2012 8:57 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On 23/01/2012, at 2:30 PM, BGB wrote:
>> 
>>> little if anything in that area that generally makes me think "dubstep" 
>>> though...
>>> 
>>> (taken loosely enough, most "gangsta-rap" could be called "dubstep" if one 
>>> turns the sub-woofer loud enough, but this is rather missing the point...).
>> 
>> Listen to this song. It's dubstep. Popular dubstep has been raped to mean 
>> "brostep" or what skrillex plays... but this song is original dubstep.
>> 
>> two cents. mine.
>> 
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlEkvbRmfrA
>> 
> 
> sadly... my internet sucks too much recently to access YouTube (it, errm, 
> doesn't even try to go, just says "an error occured. please try again 
> later."...). at this point, it is hard to access stupid Wikipedia or Google 
> without "connection timed out" errors, but this is the free internet provided 
> by the apartment complex, where traces show it is apparently through 3 layers 
> of NAT as well according to tracert (the local network, and two different 
> "192.169.*.*" network addresses)
> 
> also no access to usenet (because NNTP is blocked), or to FTP/SSH/... (also 
> blocked).
> and sites like StackOverflow, 4chan, ... are black-listed, ...
> 
> but, yeah, may have to pay money to get "real" internet (like, via a 
> cable-modem or similar).
> 
> 
> but, anyways, I have had an idea (for music generation).
> 
> as opposed to either manually placing samples on a timeline (like in Audacity 
> or similar), or the stream of note-on/note-off pulses and delays used by 
> MIDI, an alternate idea comes up:
> one has a number of delayed relative "events", which are in-turn piped 
> through any number of filters.
> 
> then one can procedurally issue commands of the form "in N seconds from now, 
> do this", with commands being relative to a base-time (and the ability to 
> adjust the base-time based either on a constant value or how long it would 
> take a certain "expression" to finish playing).
> 
> likewise, expressions/events can be piped through filters.
> filters could either apply a given effect (add echo or reverb, ...), or could 
> be structural (such as to repeat or loop a sequence, potentially 
> indefinitely), or possibly sounds could be entirely simulated (various 
> waveform patterns, such as sine, box, and triangle, ...).
> 
> the "main mix" would be either a result of evaluating a top-level expression, 
> or possibly some explicit "send this to output" command.
> 
> evaluation of a script would be a little more complex and expensive than 
> MIDI, but really why should this be a big issue?...
> 
> the advantage would be mostly that it would be easier to specify 
> beat-progressions, and individually tweak things, without the pile of 
> undo/redo, copy/pasting, and saving off temporary audio samples, as would be 
> needed in a multi-track editor.
> 
> 
> it is unclear if this would be reasonably suited to a generic script-language 
> (such as BGBScript in my case), or if this sort of thing would be better 
> suited to a DSL.
> 
> a generic script language would have the advantage of making it easier to 
> implement, but would potentially make the syntax more cumbersome. in such a 
> case, most mix-related commands would likely accept/return "stream handles" 
> (the mixer would probably itself be written in plain C either way). my 
> current leaning is this way (if I should choose to implement this).
> 
> a special-purpose DSL could have a more narrowly defined syntax, but would 
> make implementation probably more complex (and could ultimately hinder 
> usability if the purpose is too narrow, say, because one can't access files 
> or whatever...).
> 
> 
> say, for example, if written in BGBScript syntax:
> var wub=mixLoadSample("sound/patches/wub.wav");
> var wub250ms=mixScaleTempoLength(wub, 0.25);
> var wub125ms=mixScaleTempoLength(wub, 0.125);
> var drum=mixLoadSample("sound/patches/drum.wav");
> var cymbal=mixLoadSample("sound/patches/cymbal.wav");
> 
> //play sequences of samples
> function beatPlay3Play1(a, b)
> mixPlaySequence([a, a, a, b]);
> function beatPlay3Play2(a, b)
> mixPlaySequence([a, a, a, b, b]);
> 
> var beat0=mixBassBoost(beatPlay3Play2(wub250ms, wub125ms), 12.0);//add 
> 12db of bass
> var beat1=mixPlaySequenceDelay([drum, cymbal], 0.5);//drum and cymbal
> var beat2=mixPlayTogether([beat0, beat1]);
> 
> mixPlayOutput(beat2);//mix and send to output device
> 
> 
> or such...
> 
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-02-03 Thread Gilbert Röhrbein

On 26.01.2012 11:00, Reuben Thomas wrote:
> On 26 January 2012 02:42, Ian Piumarta  wrote:
>>
>> I have been sending source code individually to people
> 
> Thanks very much for finally posting the code, but what on earth were
> you thinking sending it to people individually?

Thanks for sharing code, yes. But please put it in some online code
repository. This would make it easier for us all, i think. What's your
opinion on this, Ian?

Gilbert



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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-26 Thread Reuben Thomas

On 26 January 2012 02:42, Ian Piumarta  wrote:
>
> I have been sending source code individually to people

Thanks very much for finally posting the code, but what on earth were
you thinking sending it to people individually? Is there some reason
it can't be in the idst repo or another, where the relevant version
can just be tagged or branched?

This is a classic example of where doing the right thing (which you
already know how to do!) would directly save you time, not just those
of us interested in your work. I for one would certainly rather you
were spending it writing code than emailing code to other people.

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-25 Thread David Harris

Thanks!  Better late, then never!
David


On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 6:42 PM, Ian Piumarta  wrote:

> On Jan 23, 2012, at 07:23 , David Girle wrote:
>
> > Two people have posted that the Maru code at the end of the 2011
> > report does not run on the publicly available Maru engine?
>
> I have been sending source code individually to people who expressed an
> interest in running the recently-published Maru examples.  This does not
> scale very well, so I have added a snapshot of the current version to the
> original Maru page at:
>
> http://piumarta.com/software/maru
>
> See README.examples for some starting points (including the FFT example).
>
> There is not enough discussion on the above web page about the differences
> between the versions or the reasons for the divergence, but at least the
> published examples can now be run independently.  Sorry it took me so long
> to get around to this.
>
> Regards,
> Ian
>
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-25 Thread Ian Piumarta

On Jan 23, 2012, at 07:23 , David Girle wrote:

> Two people have posted that the Maru code at the end of the 2011
> report does not run on the publicly available Maru engine?

I have been sending source code individually to people who expressed an 
interest in running the recently-published Maru examples.  This does not scale 
very well, so I have added a snapshot of the current version to the original 
Maru page at:

http://piumarta.com/software/maru

See README.examples for some starting points (including the FFT example).

There is not enough discussion on the above web page about the differences 
between the versions or the reasons for the divergence, but at least the 
published examples can now be run independently.  Sorry it took me so long to 
get around to this.

Regards,
Ian

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-24 Thread Julian Leviston

How about symbolic sound Kyma? I think that's an amazing platform - hopefully 
I'll get it soon 

http://www.symbolicsound.com

Julian

On 24/01/2012, at 6:20 AM, GrrrWaaa wrote:

> Max/MSP (which I know a couple of people on this list are very familiar with) 
> is one amongst a huge history of other visual, textual and visual+textual 
> programming languages to think about taking apart and putting together 
> structures in time (such as music). In particular, people on this list might 
> be interested in these, which arguably have more fonc than Live/Logic etc:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMusic
> http://www2.siba.fi/pwgl/pwglsynth.html
> https://github.com/digego/extempore
> 
> On Jan 22, 2012, at 9:29 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On 23/01/2012, at 4:17 PM, BGB wrote:
>> 
>>> as opposed to either manually placing samples on a timeline (like in 
>>> Audacity or similar), or the stream of note-on/note-off pulses and delays 
>>> used by MIDI, an alternate idea comes up:
>>> one has a number of delayed relative "events", which are in-turn piped 
>>> through any number of filters.
>>> 
>>> then one can procedurally issue commands of the form "in N seconds from 
>>> now, do this", with commands being relative to a base-time (and the ability 
>>> to adjust the base-time based either on a constant value or how long it 
>>> would take a certain "expression" to finish playing).
>>> 
>>> likewise, expressions/events can be piped through filters.
>>> filters could either apply a given effect (add echo or reverb, ...), or 
>>> could be structural (such as to repeat or loop a sequence, potentially 
>>> indefinitely), or possibly sounds could be entirely simulated (various 
>>> waveform patterns, such as sine, box, and triangle, ...).
>> 
>> Heya,
>> 
>> Yeah, I've had that idea for a while - although a more comprehensive one (I 
>> write music). Take a look at what Apple did to their own product Final Cut 
>> Pro... to turn it into Final Cut Pro X, and notice that there are rumors 
>> surrounding Logic Pro X, and I'm pretty sure you'll see that this idea is 
>> where Apple will most likely go when they release Logic Pro X.
>> 
>> In Final Cut Pro, they call it their "magic timeline".
>> 
>> By the way, what you're describing CAN be done with Ableton Live without 
>> much trouble... also Ableton Live has the ability to use Max for Live, which 
>> is Cycling 74's excellent Max/MSP product inlined into a Live instrument 
>> (what you're calling various waveform patterns). It's sine, square/pulse and 
>> triangle by the way, not "box"... and we also can use all sorts of other 
>> waveforms... generated or sampled...
>> 
>> Julian
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-23 Thread GrrrWaaa

Max/MSP (which I know a couple of people on this list are very familiar with) 
is one amongst a huge history of other visual, textual and visual+textual 
programming languages to think about taking apart and putting together 
structures in time (such as music). In particular, people on this list might be 
interested in these, which arguably have more fonc than Live/Logic etc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMusic
http://www2.siba.fi/pwgl/pwglsynth.html
https://github.com/digego/extempore

On Jan 22, 2012, at 9:29 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:

> 
> On 23/01/2012, at 4:17 PM, BGB wrote:
> 
>> as opposed to either manually placing samples on a timeline (like in 
>> Audacity or similar), or the stream of note-on/note-off pulses and delays 
>> used by MIDI, an alternate idea comes up:
>> one has a number of delayed relative "events", which are in-turn piped 
>> through any number of filters.
>> 
>> then one can procedurally issue commands of the form "in N seconds from now, 
>> do this", with commands being relative to a base-time (and the ability to 
>> adjust the base-time based either on a constant value or how long it would 
>> take a certain "expression" to finish playing).
>> 
>> likewise, expressions/events can be piped through filters.
>> filters could either apply a given effect (add echo or reverb, ...), or 
>> could be structural (such as to repeat or loop a sequence, potentially 
>> indefinitely), or possibly sounds could be entirely simulated (various 
>> waveform patterns, such as sine, box, and triangle, ...).
> 
> Heya,
> 
> Yeah, I've had that idea for a while - although a more comprehensive one (I 
> write music). Take a look at what Apple did to their own product Final Cut 
> Pro... to turn it into Final Cut Pro X, and notice that there are rumors 
> surrounding Logic Pro X, and I'm pretty sure you'll see that this idea is 
> where Apple will most likely go when they release Logic Pro X.
> 
> In Final Cut Pro, they call it their "magic timeline".
> 
> By the way, what you're describing CAN be done with Ableton Live without much 
> trouble... also Ableton Live has the ability to use Max for Live, which is 
> Cycling 74's excellent Max/MSP product inlined into a Live instrument (what 
> you're calling various waveform patterns). It's sine, square/pulse and 
> triangle by the way, not "box"... and we also can use all sorts of other 
> waveforms... generated or sampled...
> 
> Julian
> ___
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-23 Thread David Girle

VPRI folks appear to read posts on this forum, which takes time.
I look at the traffic on this thread and am reminded of another on
graphics that Dan Amelang took the time to make a lengthy, detailed
response to ... which to me distilled to, if you have an alternative
concept, deliver it in code and then we can discuss.
Two people have posted that the Maru code at the end of the 2011
report does not run on the publicly available Maru engine?  So how
much time is being invested by this community in what is delivered?
May I respectfully suggest that if we want more regular postings from
VPRI, we improve the signal to noise ratio on this forum.

david

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 4:50 AM, Reuben Thomas  wrote:
> On 23 January 2012 00:30, Dion Stewart  wrote:
>> Is there a hard line between science and art?
>
> No.
>
>> "How do artists and scientist work? The same."
>
> From my experience as both, true.
>
> I wasn't talking about differences between science & art, or in
> differences between the way that scientists and artists do science &
> art, but the significance of what they produce, and how they
> promulgate the results.
>
> The bricks of science are independently useful much more than the
> bricks of art are independently beautiful.
>
> --
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-23 Thread Reuben Thomas

On 23 January 2012 00:30, Dion Stewart  wrote:
> Is there a hard line between science and art?

No.

> "How do artists and scientist work? The same."

>From my experience as both, true.

I wasn't talking about differences between science & art, or in
differences between the way that scientists and artists do science &
art, but the significance of what they produce, and how they
promulgate the results.

The bricks of science are independently useful much more than the
bricks of art are independently beautiful.

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-23 Thread BGB


On 1/22/2012 10:29 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:


On 23/01/2012, at 4:17 PM, BGB wrote:

as opposed to either manually placing samples on a timeline (like in 
Audacity or similar), or the stream of note-on/note-off pulses and 
delays used by MIDI, an alternate idea comes up:
one has a number of delayed relative "events", which are in-turn 
piped through any number of filters.


then one can procedurally issue commands of the form "in N seconds 
from now, do this", with commands being relative to a base-time (and 
the ability to adjust the base-time based either on a constant value 
or how long it would take a certain "expression" to finish playing).


likewise, expressions/events can be piped through filters.
filters could either apply a given effect (add echo or reverb, ...), 
or could be structural (such as to repeat or loop a sequence, 
potentially indefinitely), or possibly sounds could be entirely 
simulated (various waveform patterns, such as sine, box, and 
triangle, ...).


Heya,

Yeah, I've had that idea for a while - although a more comprehensive 
one (I write music). Take a look at what Apple did to their own 
product Final Cut Pro... to turn it into Final Cut Pro X, and notice 
that there are rumors surrounding Logic Pro X, and I'm pretty sure 
you'll see that this idea is where Apple will most likely go when they 
release Logic Pro X.


In Final Cut Pro, they call it their "magic timeline".



I am pretty sure this costs money though.
in my case, I was using Audacity, partly because it was free...


By the way, what you're describing CAN be done with Ableton Live 
without much trouble... also Ableton Live has the ability to use Max 
for Live, which is Cycling 74's excellent Max/MSP product inlined into 
a Live instrument (what you're calling various waveform patterns). 
It's sine, square/pulse and triangle by the way, not "box"... and we 
also can use all sorts of other waveforms... generated or sampled...




I wasn't claiming originality though (although, if someone has free 
software for this, I might be more interested).


I knew it was called square-wave, but for whatever reason (mental 
slip...) wrote "box" instead. same idea though:

have a wave-generation function, stream things through filters, ...


although not nearly as advanced, this is sort of how the audio-mixer in 
my 3D engine works (it can also use streams and apply filters through 
streams, ...), as well as implementing effects like echoes and 
doppler-shifting and delays (sounds will not start playing instantly, 
but the mixer may instead calculate a delay based on how far away it is, 
and start playing then).


[ sadly, I don't know of a good way to do "realistic" spatial echoes in 
real-time, leaving such cheap tricks as "a box which enables echos"... 
likely it would involve "some way to calculate a large FIR-filter based 
on the sound-source, destination, and intermediate geometry"... ]



the main differences:
all mixer-streams mix directly to the output;
all streams are simple 1:1 filters (no composting or sequencing);
the mixer is mostly just used for playing in-game sound-effects (from 
sound files);
the stream feature is thus far currently only really used as a means for 
plugging in things like Ogg/Vorbis, MIDI, and Text-To-Speech playback 
(feeding samples through streams or layering them isn't really done);

...

probably, if I were to implement something like my idea though, it would 
be functionally independent of the 3D engine, and could probably be used 
as a standalone mixer (capable of also producing output as WAV files, ...).



other features I would probably include (forgot to mention earlier):
ability to playback particular notes from particular instruments 
(probably reusing code from my MIDI synth);

probable inclusion of spatial positioning and attenuation;
potentially: inclusion of or integration with MIDI (say, ability to pipe 
streams in as instrument patches, and other MIDI extensions);

...

possible implementation routes (should I pursue this idea) include, 
among other things:
(hackishly) augment my existing MIDI library with new features (namely, 
stream-based mixing, most likely an API independent of the traditional 
MIDI command-stream);

implement a new library, which may depend on MIDI library;
simply copy/paste any relevant code, but otherwise implement a 
new/independent library.


the latter 2 options have the merit of reducing likely code-tangle (and 
avoid polluting the MIDI synth) with what would otherwise be 
functionality unrelated to MIDI, but the cost that they would add 
another library to the project. (note: as-is, the MIDI synth does not 
implement streams or delay-based mixing, it merely mixes directly and 
operates according to time-slices. so most of this would be all new code 
anyways).



or such...


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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread Julian Leviston

On 23/01/2012, at 4:17 PM, BGB wrote:

> as opposed to either manually placing samples on a timeline (like in Audacity 
> or similar), or the stream of note-on/note-off pulses and delays used by 
> MIDI, an alternate idea comes up:
> one has a number of delayed relative "events", which are in-turn piped 
> through any number of filters.
> 
> then one can procedurally issue commands of the form "in N seconds from now, 
> do this", with commands being relative to a base-time (and the ability to 
> adjust the base-time based either on a constant value or how long it would 
> take a certain "expression" to finish playing).
> 
> likewise, expressions/events can be piped through filters.
> filters could either apply a given effect (add echo or reverb, ...), or could 
> be structural (such as to repeat or loop a sequence, potentially 
> indefinitely), or possibly sounds could be entirely simulated (various 
> waveform patterns, such as sine, box, and triangle, ...).

Heya,

Yeah, I've had that idea for a while - although a more comprehensive one (I 
write music). Take a look at what Apple did to their own product Final Cut 
Pro... to turn it into Final Cut Pro X, and notice that there are rumors 
surrounding Logic Pro X, and I'm pretty sure you'll see that this idea is where 
Apple will most likely go when they release Logic Pro X.

In Final Cut Pro, they call it their "magic timeline".

By the way, what you're describing CAN be done with Ableton Live without much 
trouble... also Ableton Live has the ability to use Max for Live, which is 
Cycling 74's excellent Max/MSP product inlined into a Live instrument (what 
you're calling various waveform patterns). It's sine, square/pulse and triangle 
by the way, not "box"... and we also can use all sorts of other waveforms... 
generated or sampled...

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread BGB


On 1/22/2012 8:57 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:


On 23/01/2012, at 2:30 PM, BGB wrote:

little if anything in that area that generally makes me think 
"dubstep" though...


(taken loosely enough, most "gangsta-rap" could be called "dubstep" 
if one turns the sub-woofer loud enough, but this is rather missing 
the point...).


Listen to this song. It's dubstep. Popular dubstep has been raped to 
mean "brostep" or what skrillex plays... but this song is original 
dubstep.


two cents. mine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlEkvbRmfrA



sadly... my internet sucks too much recently to access YouTube (it, 
errm, doesn't even try to go, just says "an error occured. please try 
again later."...). at this point, it is hard to access stupid Wikipedia 
or Google without "connection timed out" errors, but this is the free 
internet provided by the apartment complex, where traces show it is 
apparently through 3 layers of NAT as well according to tracert (the 
local network, and two different "192.169.*.*" network addresses)


also no access to usenet (because NNTP is blocked), or to FTP/SSH/... 
(also blocked).

and sites like StackOverflow, 4chan, ... are black-listed, ...

but, yeah, may have to pay money to get "real" internet (like, via a 
cable-modem or similar).



but, anyways, I have had an idea (for music generation).

as opposed to either manually placing samples on a timeline (like in 
Audacity or similar), or the stream of note-on/note-off pulses and 
delays used by MIDI, an alternate idea comes up:
one has a number of delayed relative "events", which are in-turn piped 
through any number of filters.


then one can procedurally issue commands of the form "in N seconds from 
now, do this", with commands being relative to a base-time (and the 
ability to adjust the base-time based either on a constant value or how 
long it would take a certain "expression" to finish playing).


likewise, expressions/events can be piped through filters.
filters could either apply a given effect (add echo or reverb, ...), or 
could be structural (such as to repeat or loop a sequence, potentially 
indefinitely), or possibly sounds could be entirely simulated (various 
waveform patterns, such as sine, box, and triangle, ...).


the "main mix" would be either a result of evaluating a top-level 
expression, or possibly some explicit "send this to output" command.


evaluation of a script would be a little more complex and expensive than 
MIDI, but really why should this be a big issue?...


the advantage would be mostly that it would be easier to specify 
beat-progressions, and individually tweak things, without the pile of 
undo/redo, copy/pasting, and saving off temporary audio samples, as 
would be needed in a multi-track editor.



it is unclear if this would be reasonably suited to a generic 
script-language (such as BGBScript in my case), or if this sort of thing 
would be better suited to a DSL.


a generic script language would have the advantage of making it easier 
to implement, but would potentially make the syntax more cumbersome. in 
such a case, most mix-related commands would likely accept/return 
"stream handles" (the mixer would probably itself be written in plain C 
either way). my current leaning is this way (if I should choose to 
implement this).


a special-purpose DSL could have a more narrowly defined syntax, but 
would make implementation probably more complex (and could ultimately 
hinder usability if the purpose is too narrow, say, because one can't 
access files or whatever...).



say, for example, if written in BGBScript syntax:
var wub=mixLoadSample("sound/patches/wub.wav");
var wub250ms=mixScaleTempoLength(wub, 0.25);
var wub125ms=mixScaleTempoLength(wub, 0.125);
var drum=mixLoadSample("sound/patches/drum.wav");
var cymbal=mixLoadSample("sound/patches/cymbal.wav");

//play sequences of samples
function beatPlay3Play1(a, b)
mixPlaySequence([a, a, a, b]);
function beatPlay3Play2(a, b)
mixPlaySequence([a, a, a, b, b]);

var beat0=mixBassBoost(beatPlay3Play2(wub250ms, wub125ms), 12.0);
//add 12db of bass

var beat1=mixPlaySequenceDelay([drum, cymbal], 0.5);//drum and cymbal
var beat2=mixPlayTogether([beat0, beat1]);

mixPlayOutput(beat2);//mix and send to output device


or such...

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread Julian Leviston

On 23/01/2012, at 2:30 PM, BGB wrote:

> little if anything in that area that generally makes me think "dubstep" 
> though...
> 
> (taken loosely enough, most "gangsta-rap" could be called "dubstep" if one 
> turns the sub-woofer loud enough, but this is rather missing the point...).

Listen to this song. It's dubstep. Popular dubstep has been raped to mean 
"brostep" or what skrillex plays... but this song is original dubstep.

two cents. mine.

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread BGB

On 1/22/2012 7:16 PM, Casey Ransberger wrote:

Below and mile off-topic...

On Jan 22, 2012, at 4:11 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:

On 23/01/2012, at 8:26 AM, Casey Ransberger wrote:

Below.

On Jan 21, 2012, at 6:26 PM, BGB wrote:

like, for example, if a musician wanted to pursue various musical forms. say, for example: a dubstep backbeat combined
with rap-style lyrics sung using a death-metal voice or similar, without "the man" (producers, ...) demanding
all the time that they get a new album together (or that their fans and "the man" expect them to stay with
their existing sound and theme), and if they just gave them something which was like "and so wub-wub-wub, goes the
sub-sub-sub, as the lights go blim-blim-blim, as shorty goes rub-run-run, on my hub-hub-hub, as my rims go
spin-spin-spin" or something... (all sung in deep growls and roars), at which point maybe the producers would be
very unhappy (say, if he was hired on to be part of a tween-pop boy-band, and adolescent females may respond poorly to
bass-filled "wubbing growl-rap", or something...).

or such...

This is probably the raddest metaphor that I have ever seen on a mailing list.

BGB FTW!

P.S.

If you want to get this song out the door, I'm totally in. Dubsteprapmetal
might be the next big thing. I can do everything except the drums. We should
write an elegant language for expressing musical score in OMeta and use a
simulated orchestra!

Oh come on, Dub Step Rap Metal has been done before... Korn is basically what
that is... Just because you're not CALLING it dubstep doesn't mean it doesn't
have the dubstep feel.

Interesting, also, that you chose dubstep here, because that's a genre that's been basically
"raped" in a similar way to what has been done to the ideas in object-orientism in
order to get it into the mainstream :) People think dubstep is just a wobble bass... but it's
actually more about the feel of the dub break...

Julian

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Julian,

Generally good points but I'm pretty sure the Korn I've heard wasn't dubstep.
It's also crap. T.M. :D

admittedly, I have never heard Korn (that I am aware of), so have no
real idea what it sounds like in particular. only that I think it is
often associated with Linkin Park, which generally sounds like crap IMO
(although I remember one instance where I heard "something", and had a
response roughly along the lines of "what the hell is this?", my brother
said it was Linkin Park, I was surprised, but don't remember what it
sounded like, much beyond the response of "?... strange..." and "sounds
kinda like crap...").

for some mysterious/unknown reason, my mom likes Linkin Park, I don't
know...
(and, my dad mostly likes music from when he was young, which mostly
amounts to "heavy metal" and similar).

little if anything in that area that generally makes me think "dubstep"
though...

(taken loosely enough, most "gangsta-rap" could be called "dubstep" if
one turns the sub-woofer loud enough, but this is rather missing the
point...).

or such...

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread Casey Ransberger

Below and mile off-topic...

On Jan 22, 2012, at 4:11 PM, Julian Leviston  wrote:

> 
> On 23/01/2012, at 8:26 AM, Casey Ransberger wrote:
> 
>> Below. 
>> 
>> On Jan 21, 2012, at 6:26 PM, BGB  wrote:
>> 
>>> like, for example, if a musician wanted to pursue various musical forms. 
>>> say, for example: a dubstep backbeat combined with rap-style lyrics sung 
>>> using a death-metal voice or similar, without "the man" (producers, ...) 
>>> demanding all the time that they get a new album together (or that their 
>>> fans and "the man" expect them to stay with their existing sound and 
>>> theme), and if they just gave them something which was like "and so 
>>> wub-wub-wub, goes the sub-sub-sub, as the lights go blim-blim-blim, as 
>>> shorty goes rub-run-run, on my hub-hub-hub, as my rims go spin-spin-spin" 
>>> or something... (all sung in deep growls and roars), at which point maybe 
>>> the producers would be very unhappy (say, if he was hired on to be part of 
>>> a tween-pop boy-band, and adolescent females may respond poorly to 
>>> bass-filled "wubbing growl-rap", or something...).
>>> 
>>> 
>>> or such...
>> 
>> This is probably the raddest metaphor that I have ever seen on a mailing 
>> list.
>> 
>> BGB FTW!
>> 
>> P.S. 
>> 
>> If you want to get this song out the door, I'm totally in. Dubsteprapmetal 
>> might be the next big thing. I can do everything except the drums. We should 
>> write an elegant language for expressing musical score in OMeta and use a 
>> simulated orchestra!
> 
> Oh come on, Dub Step Rap Metal has been done before... Korn is basically what 
> that is...  Just because you're not CALLING it dubstep doesn't mean it 
> doesn't have the dubstep feel. 
> 
> Interesting, also, that you chose dubstep here, because that's a genre that's 
> been basically "raped" in a similar way to what has been done to the ideas in 
> object-orientism in order to get it into the mainstream :) People think 
> dubstep is just a wobble bass... but it's actually more about the feel of the 
> dub break... 
> 
> Julian
> 
> 
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Julian,

Generally good points but I'm pretty sure the Korn I've heard wasn't dubstep. 
It's also crap. T.M. :D
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread Julian Leviston

I agree wholeheartedly with you Casey...

There are such parallels with structure here... it's just vibrational structure 
- patterns. There are SO MANY parallels here (and other places) that sometimes 
my heads hurts with the feel of all of it.

It's at once intensely beautiful and painful because there's so little 
understanding around it.

Love,
Julian

On 23/01/2012, at 12:48 PM, Casey Ransberger wrote:

> Below. 
> 
> On Jan 22, 2012, at 1:51 PM, Reuben Thomas  wrote:
> 
>> On 22 January 2012 21:26, Casey Ransberger  wrote:
>>> Below.
>>> 
>>> On Jan 21, 2012, at 6:26 PM, BGB  wrote:
>>> 
 like, for example, if a musician wanted to pursue various musical forms.
 say, for example: a dubstep backbeat combined with rap-style lyrics sung
 using a death-metal voice or similar, without "the man" (producers, ...)
 demanding all the time that they get a new album together
>> 
>> Only art is not science: it doesn't have pieces you can take apart and
>> reuse in the same way (technique does).
>> 
>> So it's not an analogy that works.
>> 
>> (I did a PhD in computer science, and I make my living as a singer.)
>> 
>> -- 
>> http://rrt.sc3d.org
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>> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
> 
> Music has parts you can disassemble and reuse. We do it all the time. I 
> appoigized to my father for stealing and warping his song, when I sent him a 
> song he wrote about me when I was a kid that I never liked, with every 
> lyrical assertion reversed.
> 
> I was afraid it would upset him. His reply was, "You've done nothing wrong. 
> This is the folk process."
> 
> Whatever the hell that means, anyway I spiked my mohawk and went to work. 
> 
> I can take a single measure of your music and produce variations based on it. 
> I can take a single line from a four part harmony you've written, transpose 
> it, change the key signature, even change the mode, and hand it back to you 
> with a string orchestra. 
> 
> We're way the hell off topic here, but I have to admit being stunned to hear 
> that a musician cannot fathom taking a piece of music apart and reusing parts 
> of it. How many guitar songs use G-D-C for the chord progression? Have you 
> ever heard of theme and variations?
> 
> Your argument about art doesn't stand. 
> 
> C 
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread Casey Ransberger

Below. 

On Jan 22, 2012, at 1:51 PM, Reuben Thomas  wrote:

> On 22 January 2012 21:26, Casey Ransberger  wrote:
>> Below.
>> 
>> On Jan 21, 2012, at 6:26 PM, BGB  wrote:
>> 
>>> like, for example, if a musician wanted to pursue various musical forms.
>>> say, for example: a dubstep backbeat combined with rap-style lyrics sung
>>> using a death-metal voice or similar, without "the man" (producers, ...)
>>> demanding all the time that they get a new album together
> 
> Only art is not science: it doesn't have pieces you can take apart and
> reuse in the same way (technique does).
> 
> So it's not an analogy that works.
> 
> (I did a PhD in computer science, and I make my living as a singer.)
> 
> -- 
> http://rrt.sc3d.org
> ___
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> [email protected]
> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc

Music has parts you can disassemble and reuse. We do it all the time. I 
appoigized to my father for stealing and warping his song, when I sent him a 
song he wrote about me when I was a kid that I never liked, with every lyrical 
assertion reversed.

I was afraid it would upset him. His reply was, "You've done nothing wrong. 
This is the folk process."

Whatever the hell that means, anyway I spiked my mohawk and went to work. 

I can take a single measure of your music and produce variations based on it. I 
can take a single line from a four part harmony you've written, transpose it, 
change the key signature, even change the mode, and hand it back to you with a 
string orchestra. 

We're way the hell off topic here, but I have to admit being stunned to hear 
that a musician cannot fathom taking a piece of music apart and reusing parts 
of it. How many guitar songs use G-D-C for the chord progression? Have you ever 
heard of theme and variations?

Your argument about art doesn't stand. 

C 
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread Julian Leviston


On 23/01/2012, at 12:34 PM, BGB wrote:

> I was more giving it as an example of basically wanting to do one thing while 
> being obligated (due to prior work) to do something very different.
> 

Yeah, sorry for diverging :) I actually realised that.

> say, if a musician (or scientist/programmer/...) has an established audience, 
> and is expected to produce "more of the same", they may have less personal 
> freedom to explore other alternatives (and doing so may alienate many of 
> their fans). an real-life example being, for example, Metallica incorporating 
> a lot of Country Western elements.
> 
> in the example, the idea is that the producers may know full well that if 
> their promoted boy-band suddenly released an album containing lots of bass 
> and growling (rather than dancing around on stage being pretty-boys) then the 
> audience of teenage girls might be like "what the hell is this?" and become 
> disillusioned with the band (costing the producers a pile of money).
> 
> this does not necessarily mean that an idea is fundamentally new or original 
> though.

True... but in this case (as in the one you're paralleling - the one of VPRI) 
it'd likely attract a new audience that appreciate it.

Julan

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread BGB

On 1/22/2012 5:11 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:

On 23/01/2012, at 8:26 AM, Casey Ransberger wrote:

Below.

On Jan 21, 2012, at 6:26 PM, BGB wrote:

or such...

This is probably the raddest metaphor that I have ever seen on a mailing list.

BGB FTW!

P.S.

Oh come on, Dub Step Rap Metal has been done before... Korn is basically what
that is... Just because you're not CALLING it dubstep doesn't mean it doesn't
have the dubstep feel.

I was more giving it as an example of basically wanting to do one thing
while being obligated (due to prior work) to do something very different.

say, if a musician (or scientist/programmer/...) has an established
audience, and is expected to produce "more of the same", they may have
less personal freedom to explore other alternatives (and doing so may
alienate many of their fans). an real-life example being, for example,
Metallica incorporating a lot of Country Western elements.

in the example, the idea is that the producers may know full well that
if their promoted boy-band suddenly released an album containing lots of
bass and growling (rather than dancing around on stage being
pretty-boys) then the audience of teenage girls might be like "what the
hell is this?" and become disillusioned with the band (costing the
producers a pile of money).

this does not necessarily mean that an idea is fundamentally new or
original though.

possibly. I encountered some amount of it before, which ranged between
"pretty cool" and "simplistic and actually kind of sucks" (take
whatever, put a pile of bass on it, call it good enough...).

some of it has just been the "wub-wub-wub" part with pretty much nothing
else going on.

I had briefly experimented (I am not really a musician, just tinkered
some) with trying to combine the "wub-wub-wub" part with a beat
(apparently, someone else thought it sounded more like techno or
industrial). I did tests trying to sing (poorly) doing both rap-style
and growl-voice lyrics (in both cases about matters of programming), but
didn't try combining them at the time as this would have been physically
difficult (both require some level of physical effort, and I also have
little personal interest either in the "rough-tough thug from da hood"
or the "gloom and doom and corpses" images traditionally associated with
the two lyrical styles). (actually, I partly vaguely remember "rap" in
the form of "MC Hammer" and Vanilla Ice and similar, from before the
days of "thugz from da hood", although this is stuff from very long
ago... although the attempts I made had more stylistically in common
with the latter, than with "MC Hammer" and similar, which were more
closer to actually singing the lyrics, rather than saying lots of
rhyming-words to a fixed beat, ...).

my own musical interests have mostly been things like
house/trance/industrial/... and similar...

I don't really have either instruments or any real skill with
instruments, so what tests I had done had been purely on my computer
(mostly using Audacity and similar, in this case). some past experiments
had involved using tweaks to a custom written MIDI synthesizer (which
allows, among other things, using arbitrary sound-effects as patches),
however I haven't as-of-yet devised a "good" way to express non-trivial
patterns in the MIDI command-language, leaving it as slightly less
effort to just use multi-track sound-editing instead...

but, I have little intention at the moment of doing much of anything
really "serious" with regards to musical stuff... (later? who

Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread BGB


On 1/22/2012 5:30 PM, Dion Stewart wrote:

Is there a hard line between science and art?

I lean towards Richard Gabriel's and Kevin Sullivan's views on this one.

"How do artists and scientist work? The same."





I was actually going to argue something vaguely similar, but was more 
busy with writing something else (a "professional musician" may not be 
necessarily that much different from a scientist or engineer, and a "mad 
scientist" may not necessarily be too much different from traditional 
notions of an artist).





" How do artists and scientists work? The same
On Jan 22, 2012, at 3:51 PM, Reuben Thomas wrote:

On 22 January 2012 21:26, Casey Ransberger > wrote:

Below.

On Jan 21, 2012, at 6:26 PM, BGB > wrote:


like, for example, if a musician wanted to pursue various musical 
forms.
say, for example: a dubstep backbeat combined with rap-style lyrics 
sung
using a death-metal voice or similar, without "the man" (producers, 
...)

demanding all the time that they get a new album together


Only art is not science: it doesn't have pieces you can take apart and
reuse in the same way (technique does).

So it's not an analogy that works.

(I did a PhD in computer science, and I make my living as a singer.)

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread Dion Stewart

Is there a hard line between science and art?

I lean towards Richard Gabriel's and Kevin Sullivan's views on this one.

"How do artists and scientist work? The same."




" How do artists and scientists work? The same
On Jan 22, 2012, at 3:51 PM, Reuben Thomas wrote:

> On 22 January 2012 21:26, Casey Ransberger  wrote:
>> Below.
>> 
>> On Jan 21, 2012, at 6:26 PM, BGB  wrote:
>> 
>>> like, for example, if a musician wanted to pursue various musical forms.
>>> say, for example: a dubstep backbeat combined with rap-style lyrics sung
>>> using a death-metal voice or similar, without "the man" (producers, ...)
>>> demanding all the time that they get a new album together
> 
> Only art is not science: it doesn't have pieces you can take apart and
> reuse in the same way (technique does).
> 
> So it's not an analogy that works.
> 
> (I did a PhD in computer science, and I make my living as a singer.)
> 
> -- 
> http://rrt.sc3d.org
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread Julian Leviston


On 23/01/2012, at 8:26 AM, Casey Ransberger wrote:

> Below. 
> 
> On Jan 21, 2012, at 6:26 PM, BGB  wrote:
> 
>> like, for example, if a musician wanted to pursue various musical forms. 
>> say, for example: a dubstep backbeat combined with rap-style lyrics sung 
>> using a death-metal voice or similar, without "the man" (producers, ...) 
>> demanding all the time that they get a new album together (or that their 
>> fans and "the man" expect them to stay with their existing sound and theme), 
>> and if they just gave them something which was like "and so wub-wub-wub, 
>> goes the sub-sub-sub, as the lights go blim-blim-blim, as shorty goes 
>> rub-run-run, on my hub-hub-hub, as my rims go spin-spin-spin" or 
>> something... (all sung in deep growls and roars), at which point maybe the 
>> producers would be very unhappy (say, if he was hired on to be part of a 
>> tween-pop boy-band, and adolescent females may respond poorly to bass-filled 
>> "wubbing growl-rap", or something...).
>> 
>> 
>> or such...
> 
> This is probably the raddest metaphor that I have ever seen on a mailing list.
> 
> BGB FTW!
> 
> P.S. 
> 
> If you want to get this song out the door, I'm totally in. Dubsteprapmetal 
> might be the next big thing. I can do everything except the drums. We should 
> write an elegant language for expressing musical score in OMeta and use a 
> simulated orchestra!

Oh come on, Dub Step Rap Metal has been done before... Korn is basically what 
that is...  Just because you're not CALLING it dubstep doesn't mean it doesn't 
have the dubstep feel. 

Interesting, also, that you chose dubstep here, because that's a genre that's 
been basically "raped" in a similar way to what has been done to the ideas in 
object-orientism in order to get it into the mainstream :) People think dubstep 
is just a wobble bass... but it's actually more about the feel of the dub 
break... 

Julian


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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread Reuben Thomas

On 21 January 2012 23:56, Robin Barooah  wrote:
>
> Whilst I share the feeling that a lot more should have been possible, the 
> earlier work informed or transformed almost all of what personal computing is 
> today, and arguably, the
> embodiments that are closest to the original are proving themselves to be 
> most successful.

And how faint the influence. We have systems that are (increasingly)
locked down, (increasingly) fragmented and (increasingly) complex. The
great gifts of introspection, re-use, sharing and simplicity are
buried somewhere underneath. Yes, without the earlier work of those at
VPRI, things would be less good. But that's small recompense.

> With hindsight, I don't think it's obvious that different tactics would have 
> changed the outcome.

Nor do I have any idea how it could have been done better.

> I would be interested to hear how you think greater impact could have been 
>achieved the first time around.

No idea. You'll notice that pretty much all my recommendations depend
on current technology.

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread Reuben Thomas

On 22 January 2012 21:26, Casey Ransberger  wrote:
> Below.
>
> On Jan 21, 2012, at 6:26 PM, BGB  wrote:
>
>> like, for example, if a musician wanted to pursue various musical forms.
>> say, for example: a dubstep backbeat combined with rap-style lyrics sung
>> using a death-metal voice or similar, without "the man" (producers, ...)
>> demanding all the time that they get a new album together

Only art is not science: it doesn't have pieces you can take apart and
reuse in the same way (technique does).

So it's not an analogy that works.

(I did a PhD in computer science, and I make my living as a singer.)

-- 
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-22 Thread Casey Ransberger

Below. 

On Jan 21, 2012, at 6:26 PM, BGB  wrote:

> like, for example, if a musician wanted to pursue various musical forms. say, 
> for example: a dubstep backbeat combined with rap-style lyrics sung using a 
> death-metal voice or similar, without "the man" (producers, ...) demanding 
> all the time that they get a new album together (or that their fans and "the 
> man" expect them to stay with their existing sound and theme), and if they 
> just gave them something which was like "and so wub-wub-wub, goes the 
> sub-sub-sub, as the lights go blim-blim-blim, as shorty goes rub-run-run, on 
> my hub-hub-hub, as my rims go spin-spin-spin" or something... (all sung in 
> deep growls and roars), at which point maybe the producers would be very 
> unhappy (say, if he was hired on to be part of a tween-pop boy-band, and 
> adolescent females may respond poorly to bass-filled "wubbing growl-rap", or 
> something...).
> 
> 
> or such...

This is probably the raddest metaphor that I have ever seen on a mailing list.

BGB FTW!

P.S. 

If you want to get this song out the door, I'm totally in. Dubsteprapmetal 
might be the next big thing. I can do everything except the drums. We should 
write an elegant language for expressing musical score in OMeta and use a 
simulated orchestra!
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread BGB


On 1/21/2012 11:23 AM, Shawn Morel wrote:

Reuben,

Your response is enlightening in many ways. I think it re-inforces for me how computer science is really more 
of an "automation pop culture." As a society, we've become engrossed with product yet we spend only 
a few minutes at most usually playing around with the artefacts produced - forming surface judgements and 
rarely if ever deconstructing them in order to understand their inner environment. As an academic discipline, 
I fear we've become entrenched in dogma around the accidental complexities we now consider "core" 
to our understanding of a problem - a running executable, bits of ASCII sigels organized in "files".


dunno if you are objecting just to the notion of executables, or to 
files in general.


I suspect in both cases though, it may be due to some extent on a 
user/psychological need for humans to be like "there is something, and 
there it is".


users then need to have a sense of files existing, and to be able to 
interact with them (copy them around, ...). otherwise, there would 
likely need to be something to take on a similar role. if it were merely 
"a sea of data", some people might be happy, but others would be 
somewhat less happy (the OS and File-System is often becoming enough of 
such a "sea of data" as it already is).


to some extent, the program binary is also, similarly, a representation 
of the "thing" that is the program (although, some naive users gain the 
misconception that it is the icon which "is" the app, leading sometimes 
to people copying the icon onto a thumb-drive or similar, going onto 
another system, and having little idea why their "application" no longer 
works on the new system).


but, like the FS, applications have increasingly started to become a 
"sea of data", as the program becomes a whole directory of files, or has 
its contents spread all over within the OS's directories.


hence, some systems have made use of an "executable" which is really an 
executable read-only archive or database (JVM and .NET).


a few systems have gone further still, having the app be essentially 
distributed as a self-contained virtual file-system. Steam does this, 
with the program being itself a self-contained read-only VFS, but 
allowing the application to write into its VFS (the actual file data is 
stored separately in this case).


I have even encountered a few applications before distributed as VMware 
images (with an entire OS, typically FreeDOS or a stripped-down/hacked 
Win9x or WinXP, bundled as a part of the "app"), granted, in the cases 
where I have encountered this, I have been left to doubt both the 
legality and competence of the developers (just how poorly made and 
hacked-together crap does an app need to be before it justifies shipping 
an entire OS with the app in order to run it?... meanwhile does MS 
necessarily approve of Win9x or WinXP being used as a redistributable 
run-time for said app?...).


granted, at least if Win98 blue-screens in VMware, it is a little less 
annoying than on real HW, but then one can be left to wonder if it just 
doesn't run well in an emulator, or if it really was that unreliable?... 
(granted, I do sort of remember Win98 being one of those OS's I thought 
was too terrible to really bother actually using, me instead mostly 
running Linux and later Win2K, before later migrating back mostly into 
Windows land just prior to the release of WinXP...).


nevermind unverified reports that WinME was worse than Win98 (with both 
poor reliability and also software compatibility problems...).



but, anyways, "application as a runnable VFS" is possibly an idea which 
could be worth possible exploration. now, whether or not it is 
allowed/possible for a user to extract the contents of such an 
application, is a more open issue (as-is whether or not the VFS is 
read-only or self-modifying).


ideally, if it could also be done better than with the Valve/Steam GCF 
system is more open (ideally... it could be done without manual 
"LoadLibrary()" / "GetProcAddress()" and API-fetching hacks, or an 
otherwise overly constrained/annoying bootstrap process...). if one were 
still using native binaries, a probable strategy could be to compile the 
program as native DLLs or SO's, and have the launcher potentially 
incorporate a customized loader (launcher opens the VFS, looks for 
appropriate binaries for the architecture, loads them into the address 
space, and executes them).


one "could" make the VFS be an EXE, but my personal testing shows this 
to be pointless on modern Windows (if executed directly, the associated 
program will be invoked, including with any file extensions).


say, image exists "foobar.myvm", and is called as "foobar.myvm Arg0 
Arg1", apparently the VM will be called with a commandline something like:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\MyVM\myvm.exe" "E:\...\foobar.myvm" Arg0 Arg1

(note that, if launching via "WinMain()", it will be a single big string 
as-above, but if by "m

Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread Robin Barooah

Whilst I share the feeling that a lot more should have been possible, the 
earlier work informed or transformed almost all of what personal computing is 
today, and arguably, the embodiments that are closest to the original are 
proving themselves to be most successful.  

With hindsight, I don't think it's obvious that different tactics would have 
changed the outcome.  I would be interested to hear how you think greater 
impact could have been achieved the first time around.

On Jan 21, 2012, at 3:45 PM, Reuben Thomas wrote:

> On 21 January 2012 23:42, Robin Barooah  wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> It seems to me that if this project has even 1/10 of the impact that the
>> earlier work had, then it will still be one of the most significant
>> contributions to the state of the art.
> 
> True, but the earlier work had far less than 1/10th of the impact it
> deserved, and I fear that'll happen again.
> 
> -- 
> http://rrt.sc3d.org
> ___
> fonc mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread Reuben Thomas

On 21 January 2012 18:23, Shawn Morel  wrote:
>
> Your response is enlightening in many ways.

Yours is deeply depressing, as it shows just how resilient the ivory
tower researcher mentality still is.

> After all, given that more or less robust implementations
> of OMeta exist, if I truly understand, for example,
> "nothing" the low level machine language, then I should
> be able to spend an afternoon with OMeta and this year's
> report's appendix and have a crude "nothing" interpreter.

We're not all researchers.

Only a few people are ever going to understand these ideas well enough
to reimplement them. But they are not the only people that count:
funders, entrepreneurs, and users have to be convinced to some degree
of the value of the ideas too, or they will not flourish. Just look at
all the good ideas in computer science that are still ignored decades
after they were dreamed up. Many of them have come from the
researchers at VPRI.

In the past, computer scientists were stuck with publishing papers,
like most scientists still are. Other researchers could try to
reproduce their results; some might push their ideas into industry,
and eventually we'd get products. But now, uniquely among the
sciences, we can directly publish our experiments, so that anyone can
try them. Keen end-users can play with them, other researchers can
take them apart to find out how they work, developers can use them
directly.

This gives more and complementary routes to a wide range of degrees of
understanding, from simply thinking "that's cool" to the traditional
scientific reproduction of results.

Merely convincing other researchers is not enough: at the very least,
VPRI's constituency is developers; to the extent that it affects UIs,
it extends to users too. There are plenty of important ideas in
computer science and software engineering that are gathering dust in
the annals of research because the relevant group has never warmed to
them.

I see two main reactions from the researchers themselves:

1. We don't want to be distracted.

Well, don't be. Publish all your code on github or a similar service,
and take no responsibility for it, don't answer any issues, reply to
any comments, and feel free to rewind and replace the repository. Even
so, people will love playing with the code you put up, will fork it,
and will do interesting work with it.

2. The stuff we have is just temporary. People should wait for the
finished version.

I'll believe that when I see a finished release. Most academic
projects never reach 1.0. You do both your intermediate work and your
audience a disservice by not releasing the intermediate work: even if
it really is as transient and unrelated to the final result as you
claim, it'll help to build interest in your work, which deserves and
needs that, and help your audience to follow you on your journey.
Teaching of most subjects tends to recapitulate their historical
development until they become mature; hence, throwing out early
research prototypes facilitates this natural (and, for the
researchers, zero-effort) didactic path.

> I think it re-inforces for me how computer science is
> really more of an "automation pop culture."

> As a society, we've become engrossed with product

You underestimate the importance of both pop culture and products to
research. Research does not grow and prosper in some abstract academic
noosphere, but in a corner of contemporary culture. Most people only
ever get as far as pop culture and products. Researchers that get this
tend to be more successful than those that don't. I'd like these
particular researchers to be more successful (and in particular, more
successful than they've been in the past) at promulgating their ideas,
which is why I'm trying to encourage them to exploit easy ways to
engage their audience.

-- 
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread Reuben Thomas

On 21 January 2012 23:42, Robin Barooah  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> It seems to me that if this project has even 1/10 of the impact that the
> earlier work had, then it will still be one of the most significant
> contributions to the state of the art.

True, but the earlier work had far less than 1/10th of the impact it
deserved, and I fear that'll happen again.

-- 
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread Robin Barooah

Hi,

It seems to me that if this project has even 1/10 of the impact that the 
earlier work had, then it will still be one of the most significant 
contributions to the state of the art.

-Robin Barooah

On Jan 21, 2012, at 3:25 PM, Peter Franta wrote:

> Agreed. It is sad, if only there was a way to get the Horse to drink once it 
> has been led to the water.
> 
> It would be great if this sort of stuff went main stream. Lets hope it leads 
> to implementations that the world can't ignore!
> 
> P
> 
> On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Reuben Thomas  wrote:
> On 21 January 2012 15:11, Peter Franta  wrote:
> > VPRI answer to their Government and Private Funders, not those of us who
> > have the fortune to observe as they go.
> 
> Government-funded is publically funded. I'm disappointed that public
> funding rules apparently impose nothing more than an annual report on
> publically-funded research programs.
> 
> > It is my understanding the deliverable is not a "product" but "lessons
> > learned" to go and do it for real! Not ideal for us but then they're not
> > serving us.
> 
> If they're government-funded they're serving the US taxpayer.
> Admittedly I'm not a US citizen, but heck, I contribute to the
> revenues of plenty of US corporations, on which they presumably pay
> tax. And I said nothing about product, but I'll get to that later.
> 
> > Clearly this doesn't match your expectations. This is frustrating to you but
> > are your expectations their concern? Where do these expectations come from?
> 
> It matches my expectations all too well: brilliant research looking
> like it will be flushed down history's toilet like so much other
> brilliant research before it.
> 
> > Popular/Successful <> Better.
> 
> Exactly. If it were the same, it wouldn't be necessary to popularise
> better research in order to make it successful. Good stuff doesn't
> drive out bad by sheer superiority, sadly.
> 
> Simply doing good research is not enough. If it were we'd be decades
> ahead in computing, and centuries in other fields.
> 
> --
> http://rrt.sc3d.org
> ___
> fonc mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
> 
> ___
> fonc mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread Peter Franta

BGB,

I love this quote from you

"sometimes, the new thing can be simpler overall, even if initially or
conceptually more complex."

This resonates with me big time. A lot of effort to build infrastructure
that will make things simpler

P

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 10:08 AM, BGB  wrote:

>  On 1/21/2012 8:11 AM, Peter Franta wrote:
>
> VPRI answer to their Government and Private Funders, not those of us who
> have the fortune to observe as they go.
>
>  It is my understanding the deliverable is not a "product" but "lessons
> learned" to go and do it for real! Not ideal for us but then they're not
> serving us.
>
> Clearly this doesn't match your expectations. This is frustrating to you
> but are your expectations their concern? Where do these expectations come
> from?
>
>  Popular/Successful <> Better. It all depends on your pov and what you
> value.
>
>
> yeah. I am just a random observer as well, and operating in the far more
> mundane world of "spewing code and trying to make it all work..." (and
> wondering if/when/where I will ever make an income).
>
> there is some amount of "experimentation", but most of this is itself much
> more mundane, and not really a central focus (it is more of a "try various
> things and see what sticks" experience).
>
>
> likewise, it can be interesting to gather and try out ideas, and see what
> all works.
> sometimes, the new thing can be simpler overall, even if initially or
> conceptually more complex.
>
>
> for example, at a basic level, dynamic typing is more complex than static
> typing (which can be seen as a type-checked variant of an untyped system).
> once things start getting more complex, and one is dealing with less
> trivial type semantics, then dynamic typing becomes much simpler (the main
> difference is that dynamic typing is not well-supported on current
> hardware, leading to complex/awkward type inference in an attempt to get
> reasonable performance).
>
> but, then there is a tradeoff:
> static types work better in the simple case for finding many types of
> errors (even a good type-inference algo with type-validation may, with a
> loose type-system, accept bad input and coerce it into a
> semantically-valid, but unintended form).
>
> dynamic type-systems work better when the types are less trivial, and/or
> may become, well, dynamic (at which point, many good old static languages
> lead either to overly complex mechanisms, or a need to "strong arm" the
> type-system via lots of casts). even in an otherwise well-developed static
> language, there may end up being stupid/arbitrary restrictions which don't
> follow from either the implementation or the conceptual semantics (such as,
> in several languages, the inability to pass/convert a generic-container for
> a subclass into a generic container for the superclass, ...).
>
> in these cases, it may well make sense to leave it up to the programmer
> which semantics they want to use.
>
> for example, in my own language, if a declared type is used, it is treated
> more like in a static language (coercing if needed and the types are
> compatible, or potentially making an error otherwise).
>
> some other languages treat things more loosely, making me wonder what
> really is the point of having type annotations in this case. what is gained
> from annotations if the compiler does not enforce the types and the types
> don't impact run-time behavior? in terms of optimization, in this case,
> they offer little more than what could have been reasonably gained by
> type-inference. there only real obvious merit is to serve as a hint for
> what type the variable "should" be (if people so happen to be look at the
> declarations at the time).
>
> granted, when one has both static and dynamic type-semantics, this is
> potentially more complex than either case by itself (although, having both
> does allow some potentially interesting semantics, such as the ability to
> handle semantics which would likely be slow in a dynamically-typed
> language, but which would be overly complicated or not possible to
> represent with traditional uses of generics or templates, such as
> conditional or "evaluated" types).
>
>
> but, who knows, maybe there are better ways to deal with all this as well?
>
> how much of the concept of 'types' is itself real, and how much is an
> artifact of the existing implementations? how much of existing programming
> practice is "real", and how much is essentially cruft?
>
> simple example:
> there are fields and there are methods;
> sometimes we want to access fields directly, and sometimes to limit such
> access.
>
> so, then the public/private notion popped up, with the usual convention
> being to keep all fields as private. then, people introduced getter/setter
> methods (and there is then a whole lot of "obj.getX()" and
> "obj.setX(value)").
>
> then, languages have added properties, so that the extra notation can be
> shaved back off (allowing, once again, "obj.X" and "obj.X=value;"), and
> have sim

Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread Peter Franta

Agreed. It is sad, if only there was a way to get the Horse to drink once
it has been led to the water.

It would be great if this sort of stuff went main stream. Lets hope it
leads to implementations that the world can't ignore!

P

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Reuben Thomas  wrote:

> On 21 January 2012 15:11, Peter Franta  wrote:
> > VPRI answer to their Government and Private Funders, not those of us who
> > have the fortune to observe as they go.
>
> Government-funded is publically funded. I'm disappointed that public
> funding rules apparently impose nothing more than an annual report on
> publically-funded research programs.
>
> > It is my understanding the deliverable is not a "product" but "lessons
> > learned" to go and do it for real! Not ideal for us but then they're not
> > serving us.
>
> If they're government-funded they're serving the US taxpayer.
> Admittedly I'm not a US citizen, but heck, I contribute to the
> revenues of plenty of US corporations, on which they presumably pay
> tax. And I said nothing about product, but I'll get to that later.
>
> > Clearly this doesn't match your expectations. This is frustrating to you
> but
> > are your expectations their concern? Where do these expectations come
> from?
>
> It matches my expectations all too well: brilliant research looking
> like it will be flushed down history's toilet like so much other
> brilliant research before it.
>
> > Popular/Successful <> Better.
>
> Exactly. If it were the same, it wouldn't be necessary to popularise
> better research in order to make it successful. Good stuff doesn't
> drive out bad by sheer superiority, sadly.
>
> Simply doing good research is not enough. If it were we'd be decades
> ahead in computing, and centuries in other fields.
>
> --
> http://rrt.sc3d.org
> ___
> fonc mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
>
___
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[email protected]
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc

Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread Reuben Thomas

On 21 January 2012 15:11, Peter Franta  wrote:
> VPRI answer to their Government and Private Funders, not those of us who
> have the fortune to observe as they go.

Government-funded is publically funded. I'm disappointed that public
funding rules apparently impose nothing more than an annual report on
publically-funded research programs.

> It is my understanding the deliverable is not a "product" but "lessons
> learned" to go and do it for real! Not ideal for us but then they're not
> serving us.

If they're government-funded they're serving the US taxpayer.
Admittedly I'm not a US citizen, but heck, I contribute to the
revenues of plenty of US corporations, on which they presumably pay
tax. And I said nothing about product, but I'll get to that later.

> Clearly this doesn't match your expectations. This is frustrating to you but
> are your expectations their concern? Where do these expectations come from?

It matches my expectations all too well: brilliant research looking
like it will be flushed down history's toilet like so much other
brilliant research before it.

> Popular/Successful <> Better.

Exactly. If it were the same, it wouldn't be necessary to popularise
better research in order to make it successful. Good stuff doesn't
drive out bad by sheer superiority, sadly.

Simply doing good research is not enough. If it were we'd be decades
ahead in computing, and centuries in other fields.

-- 
http://rrt.sc3d.org
___
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread BGB


On 1/21/2012 8:11 AM, Peter Franta wrote:
VPRI answer to their Government and Private Funders, not those of us 
who have the fortune to observe as they go.


It is my understanding the deliverable is not a "product" but "lessons 
learned" to go and do it for real! Not ideal for us but then they're 
not serving us.


Clearly this doesn't match your expectations. This is frustrating to 
you but are your expectations their concern? Where do these 
expectations come from?


Popular/Successful <> Better. It all depends on your pov and what you 
value.




yeah. I am just a random observer as well, and operating in the far more 
mundane world of "spewing code and trying to make it all work..." (and 
wondering if/when/where I will ever make an income).


there is some amount of "experimentation", but most of this is itself 
much more mundane, and not really a central focus (it is more of a "try 
various things and see what sticks" experience).



likewise, it can be interesting to gather and try out ideas, and see 
what all works.
sometimes, the new thing can be simpler overall, even if initially or 
conceptually more complex.



for example, at a basic level, dynamic typing is more complex than 
static typing (which can be seen as a type-checked variant of an untyped 
system). once things start getting more complex, and one is dealing with 
less trivial type semantics, then dynamic typing becomes much simpler 
(the main difference is that dynamic typing is not well-supported on 
current hardware, leading to complex/awkward type inference in an 
attempt to get reasonable performance).


but, then there is a tradeoff:
static types work better in the simple case for finding many types of 
errors (even a good type-inference algo with type-validation may, with a 
loose type-system, accept bad input and coerce it into a 
semantically-valid, but unintended form).


dynamic type-systems work better when the types are less trivial, and/or 
may become, well, dynamic (at which point, many good old static 
languages lead either to overly complex mechanisms, or a need to "strong 
arm" the type-system via lots of casts). even in an otherwise 
well-developed static language, there may end up being stupid/arbitrary 
restrictions which don't follow from either the implementation or the 
conceptual semantics (such as, in several languages, the inability to 
pass/convert a generic-container for a subclass into a generic container 
for the superclass, ...).


in these cases, it may well make sense to leave it up to the programmer 
which semantics they want to use.


for example, in my own language, if a declared type is used, it is 
treated more like in a static language (coercing if needed and the types 
are compatible, or potentially making an error otherwise).


some other languages treat things more loosely, making me wonder what 
really is the point of having type annotations in this case. what is 
gained from annotations if the compiler does not enforce the types and 
the types don't impact run-time behavior? in terms of optimization, in 
this case, they offer little more than what could have been reasonably 
gained by type-inference. there only real obvious merit is to serve as a 
hint for what type the variable "should" be (if people so happen to be 
look at the declarations at the time).


granted, when one has both static and dynamic type-semantics, this is 
potentially more complex than either case by itself (although, having 
both does allow some potentially interesting semantics, such as the 
ability to handle semantics which would likely be slow in a 
dynamically-typed language, but which would be overly complicated or not 
possible to represent with traditional uses of generics or templates, 
such as conditional or "evaluated" types).



but, who knows, maybe there are better ways to deal with all this as well?

how much of the concept of 'types' is itself real, and how much is an 
artifact of the existing implementations? how much of existing 
programming practice is "real", and how much is essentially cruft?


simple example:
there are fields and there are methods;
sometimes we want to access fields directly, and sometimes to limit such 
access.


so, then the public/private notion popped up, with the usual convention 
being to keep all fields as private. then, people introduced 
getter/setter methods (and there is then a whole lot of "obj.getX()" and 
"obj.setX(value)").


then, languages have added properties, so that the extra notation can be 
shaved back off (allowing, once again, "obj.X" and "obj.X=value;"), and 
have similarly allowed short-hand dummy property declarations, such as 
"public double X { get; set; };"


although there are sensible reasons behind all of this, one can also 
wonder: "what exactly really is the point?". couldn't one, say, just as 
easily (assuming the language handled it gracefully) declare the field 
initially as public, and if later it needs to be trapped, simply change 
it to pr

Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread Shawn Morel

Reuben,

Your response is enlightening in many ways. I think it re-inforces for me how 
computer science is really more of an "automation pop culture." As a society, 
we've become engrossed with product yet we spend only a few minutes at most 
usually playing around with the artefacts produced - forming surface judgements 
and rarely if ever deconstructing them in order to understand their inner 
environment. As an academic discipline, I fear we've become entrenched in dogma 
around the accidental complexities we now consider "core" to our understanding 
of a problem - a running executable, bits of ASCII sigels organized in "files".

Every year, a thread similar to this pops up and I've never really known how to 
respond. Now, I'd like to propose that if we are indeed to be considered a 
"science of computation" then we should do as other scientific disciplines and 
try to reproduce the findings.

After all, given that more or less robust implementations of OMeta exist, if I 
truly understand, for example, "nothing" the low level machine language, then I 
should be able to spend an afternoon with OMeta and this year's report's 
appendix and have a crude "nothing" interpreter. The same could be said about 
most parts of the system. If I can't reproduce this work then either:

- conceptual bits are missing
- I've found a better way to do it
- I don't really yet understand the concept

In all cases, sharing THAT experience here is more constructive for everyone. 
Build you're own interpretation of nothing or build a set of Nile programs as 
you understand Nile to work and put it on git hub.

I think the one thing that I might like to see is a screen capture of a live 
essay to make sure my understanding is in line. But then, I can build my own 
live essay in HTML / JS or something else.

I  truly believe that the goals of VPRI are better served by NOT handing out 
executable forms of their findings but rather disseminating the concepts of 
"executable Maths"

shawn

On Jan 20, 2012, at 5:52 PM, Reuben Thomas wrote:

> I have just skimmed VPRI's 2011 report; lots of interesting stuff
> there. The ironies of a working system that the rest of us can only
> view in snapshot form grow ever-stronger: the constant references to
> active documents are infuriating. The audience would like to see the
> active document, but instead we only get a printout. It's as if,
> waiting for a new film, we got only reviews of trailers rather than
> the trailers themselves.
> 
> The irony is then compounded by a code listing at the end of the
> document (hint: a URL is shorter and actually useful; this is not the
> 1980s).
> 
> And then just when we thought it was going to end, the agony
> continues: you've pushed the deadline back a year.
> 
> I wish you all a joyful and productive 2012; unlike many projects,
> it's clear that with this one the question is not whether what is
> finally released will be worth the wait, it's whether it'll ever
> actually be released.
> 
> You do shoot yourselves in the foot at one point: "The Web should have
> used HyperCard as its model, and the web designers made a terrible
> mistake by not doing so." Yes, but the web shipped and revolutionised
> the world; meanwhile, you lot have shipped stuff that, at best, like
> Smalltalk, has inspired revolutions at one remove. Many of the lessons
> of your work are decades old and still not widely learned. Contrast
> with Steve Jobs, who spun an ounce of invention into a mile of
> innovation, by combining a desire for better computing with the
> understanding that without taking people with you, your ideas will die
> with you. It's a shame and an embarrassment that to the world at large
> he's the gold standard.
> 
> Please, no more deadline extensions. Whatever you have by the end of
> this year will unquestionably be worth releasing, for all its
> imperfections. It's high time to stop inventing the future and start
> investing it.
> 
> -- 
> http://rrt.sc3d.org
> ___
> fonc mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread Peter Franta

VPRI answer to their Government and Private Funders, not those of us who
have the fortune to observe as they go.

It is my understanding the deliverable is not a "product" but "lessons
learned" to go and do it for real! Not ideal for us but then they're not
serving us.

Clearly this doesn't match your expectations. This is frustrating to you
but are your expectations their concern? Where do these expectations come
from?

Popular/Successful <> Better. It all depends on your pov and what you value.

Regards
P


On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 9:11 PM, Loup Vaillant  wrote:

> Le 1/21/2012 2:52 AM, Reuben Thomas a écrit :
>
>> I have just skimmed VPRI's 2011 report; lots of interesting stuff
>> there. The ironies of a working system that the rest of us can only
>> view in snapshot form grow ever-stronger: the constant references to
>> active documents are infuriating. The audience would like to see the
>> active document, but instead we only get a printout. It's as if,
>> waiting for a new film, we got only reviews of trailers rather than
>> the trailers themselves.
>>
>> The irony is then compounded by a code listing at the end of the
>> document (hint: a URL is shorter and actually useful; this is not the
>> 1980s).
>>
>> And then just when we thought it was going to end, the agony
>> continues: you've pushed the deadline back a year.
>>
>> I wish you all a joyful and productive 2012; unlike many projects,
>> it's clear that with this one the question is not whether what is
>> finally released will be worth the wait, it's whether it'll ever
>> actually be released.
>>
>> You do shoot yourselves in the foot at one point: "The Web should have
>> used HyperCard as its model, and the web designers made a terrible
>> mistake by not doing so." Yes, but the web shipped and revolutionised
>> the world; meanwhile, you lot have shipped stuff that, at best, like
>> Smalltalk, has inspired revolutions at one remove. Many of the lessons
>> of your work are decades old and still not widely learned. Contrast
>> with Steve Jobs, who spun an ounce of invention into a mile of
>> innovation, by combining a desire for better computing with the
>> understanding that without taking people with you, your ideas will die
>> with you. It's a shame and an embarrassment that to the world at large
>> he's the gold standard.
>>
>> Please, no more deadline extensions. Whatever you have by the end of
>> this year will unquestionably be worth releasing, for all its
>> imperfections. It's high time to stop inventing the future and start
>> investing it.
>>
>
> The FONC Wiki mention subversion repositories here:
> (stable) 
> http://piumarta.com/svn2/idst/**tags/idst-376
> (trunk)  
> http://piumarta.com/svn2/idst/**trunk
>
> I haven't tried yet, but it seems we outsiders can already play with it.
> Maybe that'll do as an actual "trailer"?
>
> Loup.
> __**_
> fonc mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://vpri.org/mailman/**listinfo/fonc
>
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread Julian Leviston

On 21/01/2012, at 9:56 PM, Casey Ransberger wrote:

> 
> Thanks for your passionate words. I hope you'll forgive my natural 
> predisposition to supply a counter-argument. It turns out that I can barely 
> help it, it's just my nature:)
> 
> Here's a project where we have some people trying to do something that a lot 
> of people have wanted to try, but haven't gotten around to. This is something 
> which is in a sense completely new; yes, most of us work in several languages 
> on a daily basis. But are these the right set of languages to get our work 
> done most efficiently? Is there a better set?
> 
> And: while artists in other fields were able to stand on the shoulders of 
> giants, programmers, generally speaking (and this is my own feeling,) have to 
> stand on a pile of dogshit. 
> 
> While we could criticize this work as shipping late, we might also note that 
> most software projects ship both late and *over budget.*
> 
> Here's a project, even a *research* project, that's shipping late strictly 
> because in four years, these people were able to come in so far under budget 
> as to buy themselves another year of invention. 
> 
> Tom West called it "pinball," you work your ass off, you do a good job, and 
> if you're lucky, they let you do it again. One of the things he was famous 
> for was "pinching his quarters," because the real game wasn't what he was 
> doing then, it was about what he was doing *next.*
> 
> West was banking everything he had to get a free ball. 
> 
> I'd like to express my unrepentant, unapologetic congratulations to 
> *everyone* who was a part of making this unique, fantastic inquiry last a 
> full year longer than we thought it would, and for involving the unwashed 
> industrial masses (read: me) in the conversation.
> 
> This continues to enrich my life and I'm damned happy to see it go on another 
> year. 
> 
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Excelsior!
> 
> 
> Casey Ransberger

I'm in agreement, Casey. I didn't see the project is "shipping late", but 
rather "under-budget so able to extend another year". I was actually quite 
happy to see it go on a further year.

Besides, it's not as though the products of the project haven't gone 
unannounced, unreleased or are in any way secret - quite the opposite. Where 
they have been finished as much as to be useful, they've been released as 
experimental prototypes or even working systems.

Sure, Frank isn't "out" yet... but as far as I understand it even Frank isn't 
the final "product", but rather part of a precursor to a more polished set of 
ideas which exist as simples and beautiful integrated pieces of "executable 
art". (Just as Smalltalk and Self were, in my opinion).

This kind of work is not the same as "normal" projects that proceed in a linear 
fashion IMHO. Truly innovative works never proceed in time in the "normal" way, 
as far as I am able to see.

I hope I haven't caused any offence by writing this. I just feel - like you, 
Casey - that something needs to be contributed to this discussion in the 
contrasting position. I'll leave it at that.

Much Love,
Julian

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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread Casey Ransberger

Below. 

On Jan 20, 2012, at 5:52 PM, Reuben Thomas  wrote:

> I have just skimmed VPRI's 2011 report; lots of interesting stuff
> there. The ironies of a working system that the rest of us can only
> view in snapshot form grow ever-stronger: the constant references to
> active documents are infuriating. The audience would like to see the
> active document, but instead we only get a printout. It's as if,
> waiting for a new film, we got only reviews of trailers rather than
> the trailers themselves.
> 
> The irony is then compounded by a code listing at the end of the
> document (hint: a URL is shorter and actually useful; this is not the
> 1980s).
> 
> And then just when we thought it was going to end, the agony
> continues: you've pushed the deadline back a year.
> 
> I wish you all a joyful and productive 2012; unlike many projects,
> it's clear that with this one the question is not whether what is
> finally released will be worth the wait, it's whether it'll ever
> actually be released.
> 
> You do shoot yourselves in the foot at one point: "The Web should have
> used HyperCard as its model, and the web designers made a terrible
> mistake by not doing so." Yes, but the web shipped and revolutionised
> the world; meanwhile, you lot have shipped stuff that, at best, like
> Smalltalk, has inspired revolutions at one remove. Many of the lessons
> of your work are decades old and still not widely learned. Contrast
> with Steve Jobs, who spun an ounce of invention into a mile of
> innovation, by combining a desire for better computing with the
> understanding that without taking people with you, your ideas will die
> with you. It's a shame and an embarrassment that to the world at large
> he's the gold standard.
> 
> Please, no more deadline extensions. Whatever you have by the end of
> this year will unquestionably be worth releasing, for all its
> imperfections. It's high time to stop inventing the future and start
> investing it.
> 
> -- 
> http://rrt.sc3d.org
> ___
> fonc mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc

Thanks for your passionate words. I hope you'll forgive my natural 
predisposition to supply a counter-argument. It turns out that I can barely 
help it, it's just my nature:)

Here's a project where we have some people trying to do something that a lot of 
people have wanted to try, but haven't gotten around to. This is something 
which is in a sense completely new; yes, most of us work in several languages 
on a daily basis. But are these the right set of languages to get our work done 
most efficiently? Is there a better set?

And: while artists in other fields were able to stand on the shoulders of 
giants, programmers, generally speaking (and this is my own feeling,) have to 
stand on a pile of dogshit. 

While we could criticize this work as shipping late, we might also note that 
most software projects ship both late and *over budget.*

Here's a project, even a *research* project, that's shipping late strictly 
because in four years, these people were able to come in so far under budget as 
to buy themselves another year of invention. 

Tom West called it "pinball," you work your ass off, you do a good job, and if 
you're lucky, they let you do it again. One of the things he was famous for was 
"pinching his quarters," because the real game wasn't what he was doing then, 
it was about what he was doing *next.*

West was banking everything he had to get a free ball. 

I'd like to express my unrepentant, unapologetic congratulations to *everyone* 
who was a part of making this unique, fantastic inquiry last a full year longer 
than we thought it would, and for involving the unwashed industrial masses 
(read: me) in the conversation.

This continues to enrich my life and I'm damned happy to see it go on another 
year. 

Thank you.

Excelsior!

Casey Ransberger
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Re: [fonc] One more year?!

2012-01-21 Thread Loup Vaillant


Le 1/21/2012 2:52 AM, Reuben Thomas a écrit :

I have just skimmed VPRI's 2011 report; lots of interesting stuff
there. The ironies of a working system that the rest of us can only
view in snapshot form grow ever-stronger: the constant references to
active documents are infuriating. The audience would like to see the
active document, but instead we only get a printout. It's as if,
waiting for a new film, we got only reviews of trailers rather than
the trailers themselves.

The irony is then compounded by a code listing at the end of the
document (hint: a URL is shorter and actually useful; this is not the
1980s).

And then just when we thought it was going to end, the agony
continues: you've pushed the deadline back a year.

I wish you all a joyful and productive 2012; unlike many projects,
it's clear that with this one the question is not whether what is
finally released will be worth the wait, it's whether it'll ever
actually be released.

You do shoot yourselves in the foot at one point: "The Web should have
used HyperCard as its model, and the web designers made a terrible
mistake by not doing so." Yes, but the web shipped and revolutionised
the world; meanwhile, you lot have shipped stuff that, at best, like
Smalltalk, has inspired revolutions at one remove. Many of the lessons
of your work are decades old and still not widely learned. Contrast
with Steve Jobs, who spun an ounce of invention into a mile of
innovation, by combining a desire for better computing with the
understanding that without taking people with you, your ideas will die
with you. It's a shame and an embarrassment that to the world at large
he's the gold standard.

Please, no more deadline extensions. Whatever you have by the end of
this year will unquestionably be worth releasing, for all its
imperfections. It's high time to stop inventing the future and start
investing it.


The FONC Wiki mention subversion repositories here:
(stable) http://piumarta.com/svn2/idst/tags/idst-376
(trunk)  http://piumarta.com/svn2/idst/trunk

I haven't tried yet, but it seems we outsiders can already play with it.
Maybe that'll do as an actual "trailer"?

Loup.
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