Amazing to watch Herbie Hancock approach the synth / sampler keys as its own instrument distinct from piano or rhodes or clav. He’s very comfortable with the stylus and touchscreen ui, too. They fit snugly into his workflow to where it feels like he helped develop them. Any videos on that? I’ll review the old Rock School videos from this same period. Quincy Jones is so lucky his dad took him to see Mr. Hancock.
I couldn't find any information - I think the instrument there is a Fairlight CMI, which Peter Gabriel actually helped develop. But considering how prominent Hancock was in electronic music it wouldn't surprise me if this was built custom. OTOH Hancock likes computers in general so maybe he's just a nerd :) https://old.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/120mqfs/herb...
The synth he's playing - making the synth brass sounds - is a Rhodes Chroma.
The Fairlight is being used as a drum machine. The Fairlight's keyboard controller is the one he points to at around 30s. The Fairlight's screen sequencer - called Page R - was easier than keyboard entry for drum and bass line programming.
I don't think Hancock did any development work or had any customisation done. (Except for the black case for the keyboard. Usually they were PC beige.)
It's fascinating this tech still has a legendary aura even though it's forty years old and has been completely outclassed by a cheap modern laptop and MIDI controller.
As for Quincy - a lot of people think talent is really just effort. But some people just have it - a deep instinctive feel for what they're doing - and he clearly did.
A friend of mine met Herbie on a Buddhist summer camp. She said he's an incredibly nice, humble guy as you would sort of imagine, he introduced himself to everyone as "Hi I'm Herbie, I'm a pianist". She didn't know anything about him so asked him what sort of music he played and he said she should listen to "Maiden Voyage". She became a jazz singer as a result.
Without steps 2) - 7), the shops still have massive logging problems. Doing those steps has the shops closer to defining the problem and showing insights and possibilities. Step 5) quantifies costs for a solution that works.
> 6) Start rapidly paring down the amount of data going to Splunk to get under budget.
Step 6a) is often “build it ourselves” or “find a less-expensive alternative” — did any of your shops do that with success?
Thank you for this post. I’d read it in ~June and it helped quite a bit with manual ‘nvidia-smi’ runs. I just recently created the systemd service description and am still delving related power and performance possibilities.
The xkcd password requires the use of spaces as legal characters. For some reason, this is still an issue with the majority of orgs with complex password requirements.
I worked for a government agency who banned @, because it would SQLi and break their Oracle-based LOB apps when you logged on and when they synced your password in the clear.
> I would much rather use TOTP than be forced to use a phone number. Phones can break.
Phones / SMS is also less secure than TOTP. It’s odd that most orgs that require 2FA yet accept only phone calls or sms as the second factor are financial institutions.
Until starting to work with local LLMs, I’d used nouveau / libre drivers for years without major issues. It’s sort of amazing how much troubleshooting and wrestling is involved getting CUDA working with older, newer or middling hardware.
One day I’m going to share stories here of how the "Columbia House Record Club" worked to watch people assume the foetal position and rock themselves to horrified sleep.
I don’t begrudge them requesting an authorized user account for some cases. YMMV. They balance this against allowing more open access to other projects, features and functions. Their balanced approach seems reasonable.
I just bought a Dell with blank-slate Windows 10 install. Windows Update came up on first boot. Most of the things billg said in this 2003 email remain true. e.g.
> This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.
(But it was GB of stuff.)
> Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn't use it for anything else during this time.
… and once that was done, it started harassing me to install Windows 11. “Harassing” like full screen takeovers with buried “no thanks” buttons and secondary “ARE YOU SURE?” screens once I found and clicked the close buttons. That hasn’t stopped.
This is why I go with Fedora Silverblue for my elderly family. When they had Windows installed, most support calls was about crazy and confusing full screen pop ups and forced upgrades.
With a stable disto, everything just works and keeps up to date without bothering the user.
Why anyone uses Windows today is a mystery to me. My guess is force of habit and lock-inn effects.
I had this with the added bonus that it deemed my machine not good enough to install W11 on. So it would scream at me to "upgrade" Windows and then reject any attempt to do so.
I installed Linux, now that Proton means all my games work anyway.
