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analogika

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About analogika

  • Birthday 11/30/1999

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  1. The decision was final when Apple bought NeXT in 1996. It was ENTIRELY built on NeXT; that was the whole point. It was a major effort to take the NeXT underpinnings and make the user interface look and feel more like Macintosh, not least to be able to integrate existing Macintosh applications seamlessly either as native Classic Mac apps or, with (quote-unquote) "minimal" adaptation, as Carbon applications. My experience, as someone who also actively worked in Mac support (and sales) during the transition: The main difficulties for Legacy Mac Users were a) the loss of the fully spatial Finder (not least because of column view) and b) the introduction of a rigid folder structure on the hard drive, which previously used to be free-for-all, with only the System Folder being taboo. Yeah, and we lost tabbed folder along the way (bit of a kludge), and I still occasionally mourn the loss of resource forks and per-file creator codes. Yes, you had to explain why passwords were necessary and what a network-connected *NIX machine actually meant, but boy, was it worth it. I don't think Apple actually changed things — more that the world moved on to where it was expected that you would password-protect your computers. There aren't really any classic Mac users around who'd be "new" to OS X at this point. 😉 The only things Apple really changed was to hide the user's Library folder and eventually lock down the System Library folder.
  2. The Roland Shakuhachi is not the Emulator sample, which has that super characteristic fifth drop and the upwards second at the beginning, and the overblowing in the middle of the sample. You can use it to kinda-sorta-passably fake it, but it's really just the Wrong Sound™.
  3. It was 1996, and back then, the only real alternative to was BeOS. And that was completely insular. …and it didn't come with Steve Jobs. But the importance of that wasn't at all clear at the time. 🙂
  4. Buying NeXT to make NeXTSTEP the basis for Mac OS X was the single most important business decision Apple has made in the last thirty years. It gave them a solid, mature OS foundation that they could OWN without any licensing issues, that was modular and scalable. It made possible the iPhone, Apple TV, iPad, Apple Watch, and made them interoperable in a way that would hardly be possible otherwise (the iPod is a possible counterexample, but remember that Apple did not create that OS — they contracted it out to PortalPlayer — and that the ecosystem integration back then was limited to syncing some files, calendars, and address book). Buying NeXT also got them Steve Jobs, of course. Jobs' primary strengths, apart from being an excellent salesman, were an extremely good (though not infallible) sense of what could work and what wouldn't, coupled with an aesthetic sensibility and taste, and above all, decision-making. Even if a decision wasn't ideal and maybe revised later, it would allow the engineers to focus and the products to have a clarity that often divided public opinion. Jobs would take the brunt, and most often, he was right.
  5. ALWAYS use the grounded extension cord. Used them since 2003 and never had a noise issue, ever.
  6. Steve Jobs was the guy who wanted the original Macintosh to be an appliance and made sure that nobody could open it at all without specialised tools. Upgrading the RAM to 2.5 MB on my 1987 Macintosh SE involved cutting traces on the main logic board. He introduced the entirely closed-box iPad as a culmination of his original vision for "The Computer for the Rest of Us" (as per original Macintosh ad copy) just before he died. From a service perspective, having worked in Mac support for many years in a previous life: socketed ANYthing sucks, especially in portable gear, unless those socketed components themselves are regularly prone to failure. Under Jobs' tenure in the mid-/late 2000's, we had entire series' of MacBooks Pro lower RAM slots failing due to flex and strain. You can bet your ass that he was one of the main driving forces behind the move to soldered RAM, because it only makes sense: the lower the voltage gets (a major factor to conserve energy in portables) and the faster the connection, the more problematic any socketed connection becomes. Putting it directly on the die with the CPU and the graphics unit, as in the Apple Silicon machines, is both the logical conclusion in terms of reliability, and in terms of distances — which takes care of the voltage issue and allows faster performance, especially when sharing RAM between CPU and GPU. I can say that this M2 Pro MacBook is the best computer I've owned in 35 years. I miss the sleek design of my previous 2016 15" MBP, and I miss the Touch Bar, though. The keyboard…the much-maligned butterfly keyboard on the 2016 machine was the best laptop keyboard I've ever typed on. I really loved it, but I appreciate that the keybed on this machine is a compromise between feel and reliability. It is still very nice. Having written all of that: the socketed storage on the Mac Studio not being upgradeable is questionable at best, and rightfully annoying. It is very much in keeping with other weird and questionable decisions Apple has made over the decades (very much including the Jobs Years), so it's really just Apple being Apple. Because, if they can make you pay up front, why not?
  7. Technically, yes — but only for plug-ins that have been ported to iPadOS (a single iZotope plugin, AFAIK, and none of the other heavy hitters: no UAD, no Waves, no Native Instruments, no Sonible, etc. So far.).
  8. Intels will throttle down to 30% or 40% speed when they get hot, which kills any workload using, say, half the available CPU power (which is easy to do with MainStage on an Intel). I’ve had this happen several times with my Intel MacBook Pro. When Apple Silicon gets hot — and it very, very, very rarely does — it throttles down to something like 80%. Even then, it runs circles and a marathon around the Intel machines. The only thing that manages to really tax my 14” M2 Pro is Final Cut. It absolutely laughs at anything audio I’ve been able to throw at it over the past year.
  9. I visited a friend's place in the States many years ago, and was a little aghast that the first thing they did when they came home was to switch on the lights and the TV in every room. Like, what? You have three (CRT) TVs, and you need them running in the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom? I realised that part of it is that electricity has always been dirt-cheap in the US, so wasting it isn't so much a "fuck you and your concern for my children's future" the way coal-rolling is, as a "who cares?" kind of thing, but man, that was weird.
  10. „The overall suicide rates by sex in the civilian noninstitutionalized working population were 32.0 per 100,000 among males and 8.0 per 100,000 among females. Major industry groups with the highest suicide rates included Mining (males = 72.0); Construction (males = 56.0; females = 10.4); Other Services (e.g., automotive repair; males = 50.6; females = 10.4); Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation (males = 47.9; females = 15.0); and Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, and Hunting (males = 47.9).“ https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7250a2.htm
  11. I'm gently amused by this, btw. Of course — who wouldn't be in favour of this! I'm just not sure declaring something the entire world has invested 80 years of research into as "mostly an engineering problem" entirely addresses the scope of what you're suggesting.
  12. The costs for nuclear power haven't dropped, and they aren't dropping. Nuclear power is horrendously expensive, and the costs for solar and wind have been dropping precipitously for decades, with none of the long-term liabilities. Nuclear may have had a future thirty years ago, when we could have pushed for effective re-use of nuclear waste (which doesn't solve the problem; it merely reduces its magnitude) and developed the appropriate reactor technology — economic viability be damned…! But the political will to push that through wasn't there, because it was obviously economically absurd and wasn't deemed necessary in the abundance of alternatives. And it may again have a viability in the future, when cheap, environmentally friendly nuclear power plants may eventually have been developed, passed certification, and been built to economically and environmentally valid standard — if ever. Currently, there are actual research projects whose results are, if ever, several decades off, and a bunch of "tiny reactor" companies promising near-term solutions, but whose tech docs are excruciatingly vague and obviously aimed solely at scammi… er, raising investor money for completely unrealistic goals. If we were to implement tech that converts existing nuclear waste, it would take many decades to come to fruition, while we have actual market alternatives available today that are far cheaper, unsubsidised, than currrent nuclear reactors if those weren't subsidised to hell and back. (If you think they aren't subsidised, start with liability insurance for a single accident — no nuclear power plant is insured, because no insurance company will touch it. So it's the governments holding the risk and ending up paying, should anything happen. Then, move on to the cost of securely storing and protecting hazardous waste for about ten thousand years. I love that the World Nuclear Association lobby group has a dedicated section discussing the "myth" that we don't have a permanent solution for disposal, which basically just says "Finland and Sweden are pretty far along in the search for a solution". 😂 I'm sure that in America, it's the power companies footing the bill for all of that, right? It certainly isn't anywhere else in the world.) For the next three or four decades, nuclear isn't solving anything. Maybe after that, if we can make it affordable and clean. And if we can move away from uranium — which will run out, eventually, as well.
  13. Second paragraph leading in is kinda the clincher: "It was proven out by a United States government research lab pilot plant that operated from the 1960s through the 1990s. But it was never economical enough to develop at scale." They spent thirty years working on the tech and failed to find a way to make it commercially viable. Which circles back to what I wrote above, which is that nuclear power is ridiculously expensive compared to renewables, once all ACTUAL costs have been factored in.
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