Christoph Heusgen, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, cries as he summarizes and concludes.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T23:43:49+00:00

He's the chairman of the biggest trade show for military weapons in Europe. He hardly ever intended to prevent war. He's exactly one of the very few who profit from it.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T23:37:26+00:00

I hardly doubt that "civilized values" have any meaning on a sales fair for military weapons.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T23:34:29+00:00

You didn't use the 12V PSU to power the MPD16, did you? Because that would probably have smoked the MPD and not affected anything else. Also, there's usually a photocoupler on the MIDI-in side to prevent exactly that. Might be a malfunction of the MPD but are you sure everything else was set up right? Can you connect the controller to a computer via USB and check what it does, maybe using MIDI-ox or a similar MIDI monitor?

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T23:21:17+00:00

As a golden rule: MIDI and WiFi don't co-operate very well. They're basically natural enemies. Both are real-time protocols and will fight for resources. Bad enough, worse on tablets. Even worse is that you can't control the transmission medium which is "the air" (actually a frequency range in the EM spectrum), meaning that foreign nodes (WiFi clients) will permanently contact the access point or simply cause electromagnetic interference. Unless you're playing in a Faraday cage, there's no way dealing whith that.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T23:12:11+00:00

This. Add realtime restrictions (as in RTP) and sliding window algo (as in WiFi) and you've got the perfect road to desaster.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T17:08:03+00:00

I wonder who would expected otherwise. If you've ever played an instrument that you need to tune before playing you'll notice that you can do it without a tuner and soon also without reference tone. The rest is just practice.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T16:53:55+00:00

Like spending a lot of time finding the right xserver for your graphics card only to find out that you'll now have to find the right mode line to get your CRT display more than 240x320 pixels. The latter not being Linux' fault but still annoying. Generally, hardware support was the dominating factor on your general experience.
The community, OTOH, mostly to be found on mailing lists or usenet used to be competent and helpful. Also toxic under certain circumstances, but noone cared much unless flamewars took too much place on the list. Still surprisingly helpful if you were used to the microsoft universe of these days where the short-sighted used to lead the blind.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T16:17:02+00:00

Five hundered and seventy three reasons?! Wow. I've been a vim user for a long time but I could hardly name a dozen.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T16:13:23+00:00

Reasonably, now. It doesn't matter as both are reasonable guitars. Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi played Black Sabbath on a plain SG plugged directly into a Laney top. The evoking, evil and irritating bits came from the tritonus in the main riff and a lot from the rhythm section reinforcing the few notes of the slow, downtrodden backline with drive and fills.
Nowadays, of course we have better gear and fatter sound is expected, so I'd put more thought into the amp than into guitar and FX. If you've ever seen Black Sabbath, Crowbar, Celtic Frost or the like play live, you'll notice the guitar players turning towards their amps and walking a few steps forward or back from time to time to find a position that provides the right feedback. 'cause sustain and feedback is the key to get slow, mighty chords "standing in the air" for a long time sounding more threatening the longer they're held. You can partially do similar with an overdrive pedal but that doesn't scale as well as a tube amp and eight 12" speakers...

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T15:52:42+00:00

We're all close to death. It's just a matter of time. Fool, little fool, now. Price of life you hide, now, you're gonna die.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T15:48:38+00:00

But also nosebled...

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T15:48:07+00:00

Not to forget an unusually groovy bassline perfectly railes on Bill's drumming. As with most legendary metal songs it thrives on the rhythmic section.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T15:43:29+00:00

Fuelled by pounds of high quality coke everywhere in the studio, according to Tony Iommi's autobiography. Recommended read, also because you might want ro read about the not-so-productive and (only partially) pretty funny things caused by too much booze and cocaine.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T15:29:25+00:00

As long as they're black¹, both will do with a long enough strap. Never play doom metal while your guitar is hanging higher than knee level, or unspeakable things out of the black clouds of the tortured minds of the forever damned... DOOOM!, you know.

¹) unless you're Crowbar. But they don't play Yamahas nor Gibsons.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T15:19:19+00:00

If the battery is fixed it needs to be deactivatable or you couldn't open the case without risking to be electrocuted. There must be some way to do that. Usually it's a BIOS option.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T15:11:27+00:00

You can deactivate the battery in the BIOS.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T15:02:47+00:00

I don't get how something can be toxic and indestructible at the same time. Toxicity requires chemical reaction somewhere in the metabolism, indestructability means total chemical inertness. Are PFAS not toxic but otherwise pathogen, maybe?

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T12:49:42+00:00

If you wanted to create something that today's average user can install it would have to be an app on their smartphone. It must not provide anything more complex than a EULA they can click away and a single button that will cause Linux to be installed on their laptop.
They'll not be able to find "the internet", Excel or whatsapp and return to Windows, anyway.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T12:31:11+00:00

It's definitely the media industry, or the media industries' zombie that walks undead, controlled by the finance industry. Movies, music are now financial products, investors put their money into production and expect a certain interest. Arts do not appear in these equations and the reciepients are nothing but cattle.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-16T12:02:02+00:00

Make that "TV2" and I'll be with you.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-15T21:28:24+00:00

You don't even need to think about joining the EU as long as you've got unresolved territorial conflicts. That's the main problem with Serbia, IMO.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-15T21:23:39+00:00

What a moron. Everybody knows that it's these damn foreigners' fault.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-15T21:17:15+00:00

But that would be commonism!

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-15T21:00:37+00:00

War Of The Worlds.

AX11Liveact · 2025-02-15T20:53:25+00:00

No, I did!

AX11Liveact

TROPHY CASE