When I talk about The Cloud (Capital T, Capital C), I'm talking about a currently fictional technology. Despite advertising claims and vaporware demonstrations at trade shows, The Cloud (as I envision it) does not yet exist ... but when it does, it will dramatically change the way we do business, listen to music, and play games.
In 2002, at the International CES trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada, Mark "the Red" Harlan, then Chief Evangelist for a scrappy little start-up called Danger, Incorporated, demonstrated an early version of a wireless internet device called the "hiptop" (later known as the T-Mobile Sidekick). He explained that it was a prototype, costing many thousands of dollars to produce, then he navigated to the Notes application, typed in a message, hit enter, and waited a moment while the Note synced to the Danger servers via wireless connection. Then he put the device on the floor, and dropped a bowling ball on it!
Aren't You Being a Little Hasty in Making This Data Free? -- very nice deconstruction of a letter sent by ESRI and competitors to the British Government, alarmed at the announcement that various small- and mid-sized datasets would no longer be charged for. In short, companies that make money reselling datasets hate the idea of free datasets. The arguments...
What's calling to me tonight is to honor my friend and colleague Doug Fieger, leader of the rock band The Knack who had a monster commercial hit with "My Sharona" in the late 70s.
Rick "Loop.pooL" Walker's shows veer from hypnotic to energizing to amusing in the space of a single minute. Follow along as he whips DayGlo orange plastic, bar glasses, vibrators, and digital electronics into a swirling cloud of sound. Includes nine MP3s.
One of the biggest hassles in the home studio has always been recording drums and percussion. DrumCore, the database of celebrity grooves you play like an instrument, aims to make building better drum tracks drag-and-drop simple. Is it the breakthrough songwriters have been waiting for? Producer Tim Tully digs deep.
The palm-size GT-R1 combines a 24-bit stereo WAV recorder with guitar effects, drum patterns, infinite overdubbing, and even a looper for practicing. "What we have here," says impressed reviewer Mark Nelson, "is a recorder that will make you a better musician."
NI has fused six of its high-end synths and effects into a single "greatest hits" instrument and piled on an elegant hardware control surface. Kore 2 delivers the full sound of the component instruments in a streamlined package at a friendly price. Jochen Wolters dives deep and comes away impressed.
In less than five years, Guitar Hero has become not only one of the most successful video games of all time but also a pop cultural phenomenon, immortalized on everything from South Park to Gossip Girl (Serena shreds "Free Bird"). Read all about how the game makers create convincing avatars of your favorite rockers, and scrapped a remarkably inaccurate scripting program for musical notation they dubbed "Murder
Face."
There are a whole lot of things that sound good the second you start making noise on them: Door springs. PVC pipes. Waterlogged Gertie balls. The Fat Man demonstrates how a DIY, Maker approach can help you find your signature sound.