OSNews

'musician' isn't the term to use, but does anyone else here produce music on their computer?

If so, what kind of music and what's your set up?


Currently I'm using FL Studio (not the greatest peice of kit, but it's doing the job for now) and Ableton to build up the individual tracks into an album peice. I also have a number of midi controllers hooked up, but other than that, not actual hardware as such.

The stuff I'm producing at the moment is an Aphex Twin inspired story. Kind of like war of the worlds, but without the narration.

I've not been at it for long though so I'm still relatively low down on the huuuuuge learning curve that is digital music.

It will be interesting to hear what other OS geeks are working on as I know there's a few audiophilles on there.

I don't know how many "conversations" I have started about this topic.
Today I want to discuss it once again. We were told that it was going to change dramatically. But all that changed is when we mod somebody down we are reminded that it only means "I disagree".
For any practical purpose, nothing relevant has changed. Modded down posts "disappear" (even if I have a score threshold of -20).
People with "controversial" opinions are modded down to hell...
The latest, most painful experience was Eugenia, a nice way to tell her "thanks for all the work you have done for us".
As to myself, even if I have been modded up quite a bit of late, I have also been modded down unreasonably, IMO.
Until people won't be able to freely express their opinion, this place will never be or feel like a real community. I mean, I have posted 839 times in 3 years. That is absolutely nothing. If this place felt like a community, my post count would be in the thousands.

Now that Best Buy sells Ubuntu Linux in their stores, I decided to buy a copy to support this move. What an adventure!

I purchased it online, but good luck finding it unless you have a direct link or use the search box. I checked to see if it was in-stock at my local Best Buy, which it was, so I chose in-store pick-up.

Big mistake!

I purchased it and waited for the confirmation email. It should take 45 minutes, but it took 2 hours - just to tell me they didn't have it in stock! I figured they just didn't know what they were doing, so I drove to Best Buy anyway.

It was sitting on the shelves (3 copies)!

However, it wasn't under OS's, it was just on the shelf in a random location. That's probably why they couldn't find it. I had also looked under OS's. I took it to the pick-up counter to explain the situation - they were very dismissive. To top it all, they didn't remove the protection, and the alarms went off as I left. All this just to help out Ubuntu.

Oh w

Going beyond simple browser based OS marketshare numbers, everybody who feels like it can comment on the operating systems he has used and what operating system(s) he's using/considering now. Maybe also what marketshare trends you're seeing around you (work/university/friends/family) and what country you're from. No flamefest, please.

I'll go first:
Country: Germany
--GeoWorks Ensemble [~100MHz laptop]
--Windows95 [or maybe 98?, ~250MHz Desktop]
--WindowsXP [~500MHz Desktop]
--2003?--Suse 8.x WinXP dual boot [Athlon 3000+ Desktop]
--Linux distro-whoring, some desktop oriented BSDs, kept using WinXP
--PCLinuxOS, WindowsXP
--2006?--PCLinuxOS, (K)Ubuntu mainly [first time Linux only!]
--2008--Kubuntu [PCLinuxOS as a live CD]

Friends/Family: 90% XP, 5% Vista, 5% Linux
University [physics faculty]:
--students: 70% XP, 10% Vista, 10% Mac, 10% Linux
--profs: 50% XP, 10% Vista, 20% Linux, 20% Mac

I figured I'd share a post I just made to doctorwhoforum.com here. Let's not bash each other's OSes, but have some fun. In "The Sarah Jane Adventures" series, she has both a desktop computer, which has no name, and "Mr. Smith" which is an... err... somewhat more elaborate rig:

I noticed ads started showing up for me today, so I'm thinking my paid membership may have expired, but I don't see anywhere to renew it. Am I missing it?

I do!


Top 5 Web 2.0 Inventions
------------------------------
5. The Javascript denial-of-service attack (see AJAX)
4. New verbs (Blog it, twitter, or just plain IM or get off the pot)
3. Contrary to popular opinion, people REALLY want to see pictures of your pets
2. With thousads of lines of code, dual-processors and 2GB of ram, your web app can now mimic the behavior of a 1990 desktop application.
1. Web 2.0

Having used Gnome for at least two years nearly exclusively, I decided to burn a Fedora 9 x86_64 KDE Live spin to a cd and boot from it. After all, this is major step in the development of a great free software *n*x desktop environment.

I'd like to ask all users, especially those that fanatically cling to Gnome, to try this (or any other suitable) KDE 4 live cd and let us know what you think. What sucks, what rules.

I'm calling it. I may look like a fool in eight days, but I'm calling it.

I just read this story on Gizmodo about some "placeholder text" on the AT&T site that mentions the "iPhone Black." Apple is out of iPhones. It's here. I'm predicting a new iPhone tomorrow or next Tuesday in the Apple store.

I know that AT&T employees were told to limit vacation in June, but there are lots of little tidbits (e.g. Italy launch in "weeks") that lead me to this: I have a sneaking suspicion that we'll see a new iPhone sooner than most think.

I've wrapping up what can only be called "moderation 2," what will surely end up being the biggest rewrite of OSNews voting/moderation since it was introduced. Since we made our last changes and introduced the "report" button, we've had to field many questions and address confusion about what the vote down button means now. Rather than attempt to band-aid the confusing but functional current system, we're going to start with a new moderation paradigm.

The new system will be word based, so you'll choose a term that will assign + or - points to a comment. But before I get too into it, tell me what words you think should be available for moderation. Here's what we've got so far:

Informative, Insightful, Funny are positive mods
Troll, Inaccurate, and Offtopic are negative mods

Then we have a Report Abuse option for... you guessed it... reporting comments that violate to the TOS such as spam, personal attacks, or or hate speech.

Are we missing anything?