Ryanmf

Elsewhere in the comments someone claims to have found his Facebook profile, and perhaps they did. But as a counterpoint, my hometown of Glendale (Northeast LA-adjacent) has the largest population of Armenians anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. Lots of Armenians == Lots of guys named Armon/Armen/Arman. We can safely assume at least two of them drive for Uber.

I love Mutable Instruments so very much.

And somehow I'd missed the SP LXR, thanks for the link.

I sort of agree.

On one hand, if you have no use for CV i/o aleph is basically a non-starter. Additionally, there are other CV solutions e.g. Expert Sleepers or the Kenton MIDI > CV boxes that get the job done a lot cheaper.

As you note, a substitute (of sorts) for anything they make can be had cheaper. Brian & Kelly et. al. have never been a concern oriented towards being the budget provider of anything, as they readily admit:

"monome is operated on a human scale. we use local suppliers and manufacturers with whom we've created long-term, trusting relationships. environmental and economic sustainability are critical considerations in our design process. we believe in beautiful design and quality craftsmanship. editions are produced in short runs according to demand. staying small affords the flexibility to pursue interesting new directions, not simply commodify established trends."

There is something to be said for the blank slate, raw unadulterated OSC, it only does exactly what you tell it to do design ethos. When I bought a monome I had never seen or used anything like it before. Though it should be noted that I sold my monome and kept my Launchpad, at least in part because the monome could be sold for exactly what I bought it for, and I'd be lucky to get $100 for Novation's hunk of molded plastic.

However, $1400 doesn't get you very far in Euro (especially if we're including the aforementioned ES modules to emulate aleph's USB>CV capabilities). One sound source, an EG and a filter? Maybe an additional source of modulation if you budget well? Not to mention power, rails and cases, cables and other accessories, etc. Ultimately, I defy anyone to find anyone with any experience in the matter who doesn't think modular synths are a money pit.

For that matter, Reaktor is basically just a springboard to spend more money on more Reaktor ensembles—largely because there are some teams doing really great stuff for that platform—and Max, plus an audio interface, plus a cheap plastic box of knobs and faders leaves you maybe $700 to buy a computer? It's not as if aleph is way out of line with the alternatives on price.

Where it does stand alone, and the reason I find it compelling, is that aleph is the first all-in-one box I'm aware of that offers the sound/data processing and marshaling capabilities of a computer without the "dude checking his email on stage" aspects of a laptop. That's something that I believe people have been awaiting anxiously, and although it's far from perfect, it's a start.

I submitted a two point critique via the Uservoice widget, one was merely a UI issue, another I feel might be worthy of a wider discussion.

I was excited to see this posted, and hoped it would be what I had been looking for. My friends and I had not yet found a suitable World Cup prediction competition site.

I immediately signed up, and was ready to send off some invites, when I found that Scoragora wanted me to predict a score for each of the 48 matches in group play, a fairly tedious exercise. Further, upon completion, it is completely unclear whether the game will be calculating winners and runners-up from the groups automatically, whether there will be an opportunity to pick winners in the knockout rounds—basically everything after group play is a mystery.

Suffice to say this is not what I expected. I can understand some need for score predictions—most likely in the later rounds for tie-breaking purposes (perhaps the best way to handle this is to ask users to predict the cumulative goal differential of the winning side). But score predictions ultimately aren't the core functionality of a game like this. If I predict that Brazil will defeat Mexico 4-0, and my friend predicts that Brazil will win 4-1, I don't really care who was right about the score, we both rightly acknowledged that Mexico is a shambles at the moment (poor Chicharito—he's only 26!) and that Brazil ought to win.

The functionality I expect to see front-and-center is, simply put, predictions about who wins each match through the final. I truly can't tell whether that functionality exists in Scoragora right now, and I don't really care to predict 96 scores for the privilege of finding out. Moreover, I'm the geek in my group of friends, there's at least some chance I might fill out the entire prediction form to satiate my curiosity about how you've constructed this web app, but I'm certain none of my friends will have the patience to do so, so I won't be inviting them, and we'll conduct our competition elsewhere.

UPDATE: I've just tried out Yahoo's game, and theirs is structured almost identically (though a bit prettier), so maybe my expectations are out of line? I don't understand why the game basically resets when the knockout rounds begin. If i predict that Spain and Chile will get out of their group, and a friend predicts Spain and the Netherlands, and another predicts the Netherlands and Chile, there should be some benefit for the one made the correct prediction and some penalty for the two who didn't.

  "The ruling confirms the need to bring today's data
  protection rules from the 'digital stone age' into
  today's modern computing world where data is no longer
  stored on 'a server', or once launched online disappears
  in cyberspace"

— European Commission vice-president Viviane Reding ("who has led the EU's data privacy efforts")

What—and I'm asking in earnest—is that quote even supposed to mean?

  shitty.enterprises
  butt.construction
  wank.academy
  bum.careers

So this might be my new favorite website. (also, Andrew WK oughtta register party.institute)

OP: Did your analysis of MF DOOM include his work alongside Madlib as Madvillian or his various other pseudonyms (King Geedorah, Viktor Vaughn, etc.)?

I find it a little hard to believe he's not at least in the Wu Tang/Canibus/KK cluster, if not #1 overall.

This turned out to be a bit more credible than I expected, though I'm surprised to see Shure rated higher than Grado.

Moepstar is right, Beyerdynamics should absolutely be on the list, and given the success of the TMA-1 Aiaiai should be as well. Also, Audio Technica may have produced some cheap crap in the past, but they should be at least one category higher based merely on the strength of the ATH-50.