[LAU] bitwig announcement

[gene heskett]

On Friday, January 20, 2012 11:17:28 AM Rustom Mody did opine:

> On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 6:35 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine <
[...]

> > If you are musician in the first place, then it's a matter of what
> > works best for you. If you are geek in the first place, then there's
> > no way you will abandon free software, so what's the problem? :)

:-)

> > We are talking about competition which is a natural thing. Rosegarden
> > can lose users to MusE or Qtractor. Qtractor can lose users to Ardour.
> > It happens all the time. Can you see any of the developers crying,
> > because they are all alone? :)

Nope, its good that there is a plethora of ways to approach audio on a 
linux system.

> > Alexandre Prokoudine
> > http://libregraphicsworld.org
> 
> Some may like to see this:
> http://apcmag.com/linux-now-75-corporate.htm
> [And some may not :-) ]

Con nails it on the head there IMO.

One distribution that I am aware of has made some kernels with his BFS 
patches, and I have been running those kernels on this pclos machine for 
quite a while.  The improvement in response from the users experience angle 
has to be experienced in order to believe it.  Its better than the 
deadline, its better than the teeny bit they did put into mainline & called 
cfs.  When I do feel a lag, I can glance up at  the gkrellm display and see 
that something else of likely dubious utility, has all 4 cores of this 
phenom loaded to 75+%. That stuff should run in between key presses, NOT 
delay them IMO.

The one thing I always admired about the amiga was that regardless of what 
some graphics rendering application such as lightwave was doing, the 
amiga's response to the keyboard or mouse were absolutely instant, and it 
was done on a machine with a 25 mhz 68040 cpu, often with 8 megs or less of 
main memory.

Heck, at the tv station where I was the CE for nearly 20 years, a stock 
1200 and a Supergen (genlock kit) did all of our station ID graphics for 
nearly 10 years.  Only taken down when we converted to digital.

Linux, today, still could not have done that because we'd have had to 
schedule the trigger some random amount from 1/2 second to 10 seconds ahead 
of time. 'scuse me but that's bs, all that background stuff can be parked 
on the stack while the job it is being asked to do, gets done.  But no, 
linux, with its kilobyte stack limit, it is far more important to finish 
that background housekeeping task that doesn't mean squat because there 
isn't room to save it on the stack.  The fact that interactivity sucks 
because of that limit simply is not on Ingo's radar.  I long since gave up 
banging on his mailbox with complaints, but a chance posting of a link here 
pulled my trigger.

I am after all, now a diabetic, crotchety old fart of 77 who quit school 
and went out to fix tv's in 1948, and who has watched this computing thing 
take off almost from the gitgo.  It has come quite a ways since the first 
program I wrote that ran on an RCA 1802 based machine, and which did a job 
to perfection for at least 12 years that I know of, after I had headed on 
down the road in search of that mythical greener pasture.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
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-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene>
You had mail.  Paul read it, so ask him what it said.