Latency

Why is it that a 4 year old mac powerbook has almost negligible audio latency when playing "virtual" instruments, while my core duo notebook has about a half second latency? I suppose it is the stock sound drivers and hardware in my HP budget notebook.

I know, I should have invested in a newer mac than buy a budget notebook, but I thought I would only be using the HP for work related grunt work. Little did I know that the trackpad would be better than my powerbook, and when I really get down to aesthetics, there are some nice features in a windows computer, like a delete key, separate page up and page down keys, little stuff like that.

So I am torn between the neat-o factor of the powerbook and the grunt work machine that I find myself spending more and more time with. Apple has some nice features, and Vista is kind of a lumbering giant of an operating system. Somebody said, "wouldn't it be nice if you could roll them both together into something really nice." That might be the way to go if it were possible.

I do musical things with my computers, and the mac has carved itself out a nice little niche in my doings. The HP has processor power, and though I may record things on the PC, I will probably actually "play" them on my mac, using it's sweet sounding software synths and low latency drivers.

I guess I'm lucky to have both worlds to visit, though I can't seem to decide which box is my home computer. Maybe in a few years I'll invest in another mac, or not.

Is wikipedia worth the effort? Frequently, wikipedia articles rise to the top of google searches, but how much weight should one put on these articles that are often biased, fabricated, prejudiced, or fictitious?

I used to think it was a good general reference for factual material, but case in point: Jenning J-22. The article on wikipedia is biased, uses blogs as references, and is just plain crap. I tried to add some references to their miasma, but got labeled as a vandal and had my account closed.

I have since discovered other articles that bear little relevance to reality that make me want to avoid wikipedia in the future. It seemed like a great notion, that people could actually be trusted to edit factual information, but I guess it is just a bulletin board full of advertisements and disinformation. Dig a little deeper in your web searches and find the references that wikipedia claims to use.

I've done some updating to the Turinghub.com site recently.

I have what should be a more random selection of the bots now when you click on the "Take the Turing Test" link. Some of the bots are running at mimetic-science.org, and I'll probably keep those there. One of the new additions allows the hub to fall back on the turinghub.com bots if the server at mimetic-science.org takes a dump. That happens from time to time, and now there's a way to recover partially from that.

I moved all the polls from IMS server to TH, and hopefully got them lined up with the right bots. I also added a "how robotized are you?" - poll for the fun of it.

For members who subscribe or are invited to the hub, I've added a mailing list. It will probably be mostly news about the hub.

I'm adding some content here and there, trying to make the site fun and useful.

Robby.

This is my mantra for the new year (2008) :

Tune out, Turn off, and Drop down.

I like to ask people how robotized they are. The average hip, cool person will say, "I'm not robotized at all." Some people will say, "I'm about 50% robotized." I like to say that I am 99.9999% robotized. It's the other 0.0001% that provides the inner soul gyroscope of humanity.

Okay, I stole most of this from Dr. Timothy Leary. He's dead. No, no, no, he's on the outside looking inside.

Okay, I stole that from The Moody Blues.

I stand on the shoulders of giants. Give me a lever, and watch me move the world.