Might pick one of those mixers up...
M-Audio today unveiled two new portable digital pianos, as well as a rack-mountable 8 x 8 audio MIDI interface. The Fast Track Ultra 8R features an MX Core DSP mixer and eight Octane-enabled preamps, and delivers connectivity through a single USB 2.0 connector. M-Audio advertises that the Ultra 8R low-noise, high-gain preamplification, and near-zer...
[From M-Audio intros 8x8 MIDI rack, two keyboards]
Yay!
March 11, 2008 7:00 AM
Electronic Arts' Ben Ball recently provided an early look at some of the features planned for The Sims 3, the third iteration of the popular Sims series which allows players to control the lives of digital people. The Sims 3 will focus on offering a seamless environment largely devoid of load screens as well as a wealth of customization options for Sims creation and environment modification.
The first thing you’ll notice about The Sims 3 is that the Sims now live in a completely seamless, living neighborhood. This means that they can walk next door, walk down the street, drive to the center of town, stroll through the park, and explore everything without ever encountering a load screen. Wherever you go in your town, you will see other Sims going about their daily lives. You’ll discover new things about the community that your Sims live in, and you will have the chance to participate whenever and wherever you like. As a player, this is an incredible innovation for me because now I can see what my neighbors are up to all of the time and go interact with them. Or if I am feeling devious I can peek through the window and spy on their every move. I can even shoot across town to see what the other families in my town are doing, any time of day or night. It’s an entirely new way to play with your Sims!
The second aspect of The Sims 3 that always impresses me is our completely reinvented and realistic Create a Sim. In The Sims 3, you have so much freedom to create the Sims that you want to make, yet it’s easy and fun. In the coming weeks, we will have some screenshots on our website that show you a small glimpse of what is possible with Create a Sim. The Sims can look like anyone you imagine. I’ve made my friends, my great grandpa, and many other important people from my life. We also have a new realistic personality system called Traits that allows you to determine the personality of every Sim. There are dozens of Traits that you can assign to your Sims. Every Trait will change the way that your Sims feel, think and behave in the game. You can choose several traits for your Sims, so it’s really possible to make any character that you can imagine and they will come to life in The Sims 3. Now imagine placing these unique personalities into your very own “Petri-dish” that is the new seamless, living neighborhood.
The Sims 3 is expected to be be officially announced later this month. To read the rest of Ball's comments about the game head over to the Worthplaying site linked below.
Worthplaying: The Sims 3 Details
[From An Early Look At The Sims 3]
The Sims 3
Engadget has this cool guitar hack:
Whenever your baby monitor isn't pulling in live NASA feeds (or making sure all is well in the life of your child), why not let it really wail? An ingenious hack created by jovial_cynic has us all too excited to snag a Safety 1st monitor of our own, as he's figured out a way to convert it into a low-fi wireless guitar amp. Granted, Mr. Cynic uses a mandolin to demonstrate, but everything from an electric banjo to a Les Paul Custom could take advantage. Hit up the read link to see how it all came together, and peep the in-action video after the break.
Forumwarz - Forumwarz - A free browser-based RPG about Internet Culture
Wow, this is fucking epic.
Flock 1.1 Browser: Even a Little Cooler - PC World: " (Via Google News - Sci/Tech.) Fantastic idea! gearsAJAXHelper: Use Google Gears with AJAX APIs for Faster Queries: "Google Gears is an API that is known for giving developers the ability to have their webpage viewable offline. However, it can also be used to speed up your website. In the case of the AJAX APIs, you can use the Google Gears local cache and client-side database to have queries load fast with cached data while requests for fresh data are done in the background. (Via Google AJAX Search API Blog.) So I've been working on getting most of my commonly-used libraries and tools in MacPorts to be 4-way universal (i386, x86_64, ppc, ppc64) for some reason.
Ars TechnicaFlock 1.1 Browser: Even a Little Cooler
PC World'-
A few months ago, I wrote that Flock, the social-media browser built on top of Firefox, had become my new favorite browser. It still is--and today, the Flock folks released a beta of version 1.1.
Read more!
2/21/2008
gearsAJAXHelper: Use Google Gears with AJAX APIs for Faster Queries
We decided it would be cool to write a small library to make it easy for you AJAX APIs developers to write quick-loading, always fresh searches/feeds. The gearsAJAXHelper has two main features - it allows you to store and return key/value pairs from the local database, and it allows you to choose whether you want all resources files on the page (images, CSS, Javascript, HTML) to automatically be cached in the Gears cache.
The key/value pair database feature let's you store the query/results as a key/value pair. Then, the next time the query is made, the results can be served from the database while fresh results are being retrieved. This dramatically reduces the latency in queries/feed grabs.
The (optional) automatic cacheing of resource files will make it so that each time the user visits your webpage they will be getting resources served from their Google Gears cache, not new versions from the internet. Be careful when using this feature, as you might not want stale content to be served. There is also a refresh function, to clear the Google Gears cache of old files.
Here is a sample application that uses the gearsAJAXHelper to quick-load feeds. Notice that after you have clicked on a candidate (or state) once, the next time you click it will quick-load the results. If the results in the database are stale, you will see fresh results populate the content area. Here's how the gearsAJAXHelper library is used in this code:
gearsAJAXHelper.initialize('election', 'election', false);
This initializes the library. The first two parameters you pass in are what you want the name of the Gears LocalServer ResourceStore and Gears Database to be named, respectively. The third parameter specifies whether you want your page's resources to be automatically cached.
Then there are just three other main calls that are used:
gearsAJAXHelper.storeKeyVal(key, value);
gearsAJAXHelper.returnKeyVal(key);
gearsAJAXHelper.refresh();
When you make any requests, store the results using gearsAJAXHelper.storeKeyVal(key, value). Use the query/feed address as the key, and the results as the value. In the case of the Presidential Application, in the NewsBox.prototype.searchComplete function I wait until the results have been turned into the desired HTML, then I store that as the value and the query as the key.
The NewsBox.prototype.loadNewsBox function is called before any search is executed. In here, I use gearsAJAXHelper.returnKeyVal(key) to check if the query has been done before - if it has we will use the HTML returned. This should be a near-instantaneous operation. Immediately after, I execute the search we would have done so that when it completes fresh results will be served. If the database doesn't have the key/value pair stored, then we will execute the query as normal.
In some cases, you might want to clear the database of old entries as well as clear the Gears LocalServer cache - use the gearsAJAXHelper.refresh function for this.
Read more!
The benefits of Intel 64bit on Leopard
I managed to get p7zip to compile most recently, and came across some interesting (but expected) benchmarks, below the jump.vistasucks:~ mjc$ file /opt/local/lib/p7zip/7za
/opt/local/lib/p7zip/7za: Mach-O executable i386
vistasucks:~ mjc$ 7za b
7-Zip (A) 4.57 Copyright (c) 1999-2007 Igor Pavlov 2007-12-06
p7zip Version 4.57 (locale=utf8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,4 CPUs)
RAM size: 2048 MB, # CPU hardware threads: 4
RAM usage: 850 MB, # Benchmark threads: 4
Dict Compressing | Decompressing
Speed Usage R/U Rating | Speed Usage R/U Rating
KB/s % MIPS MIPS | KB/s % MIPS MIPS
22: 5491 318 1677 5342 | 66842 314 2193 6880
23: 4914 293 1706 5007 | 63836 303 2197 6661
24: 4697 291 1736 5051 | 60478 297 2150 6395
25: 4580 289 1806 5229 | 57585 289 2131 6169
----------------------------------------------------------------
Avr: 298 1731 5157 301 2168 6526
Tot: 299 1950 5842
So, about 5100 MIPS for compression, and 6526 for decompression.vistasucks:~ mjc$ file /opt/local/lib/p7zip/7za
/opt/local/lib/p7zip/7za: Mach-O universal binary with 4 architectures
/opt/local/lib/p7zip/7za (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
/opt/local/lib/p7zip/7za (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
/opt/local/lib/p7zip/7za (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc
/opt/local/lib/p7zip/7za (for architecture ppc64): Mach-O 64-bit executable ppc64
vistasucks:~ mjc$ 7za b
7-Zip (A) 4.57 Copyright (c) 1999-2007 Igor Pavlov 2007-12-06
p7zip Version 4.57 (locale=utf8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,4 CPUs)
RAM size: 2048 MB, # CPU hardware threads: 4
RAM usage: 850 MB, # Benchmark threads: 4
Dict Compressing | Decompressing
Speed Usage R/U Rating | Speed Usage R/U Rating
KB/s % MIPS MIPS | KB/s % MIPS MIPS
22: 5047 237 2067 4910 | 73837 317 2394 7600
23: 6437 319 2057 6559 | 80538 351 2394 8404
24: 6177 317 2095 6641 | 73552 327 2376 7777
25: 5585 295 2159 6376 | 71518 324 2361 7661
----------------------------------------------------------------
Avr: 292 2095 6122 330 2381 7860
Tot: 311 2238 6991
This time, with Leopard picking the x86_64 code, we see 6100MIPS for compression, and 7860MIPS for decompression.
Those extra registers helped quite a bit!
Read more!
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