Episode #14: Show Notes
Steve Gibson: Google’s worrisome analysis of Modern Hard Drive failure rates.
In mid-February 2007, the Google Labs researchers at Google released their findings discussing and describing the surprisingly low reliability of their more than 100,000 hard disk drives which they use within their Internet search index and other applications. The numbers showed that MUCH higher drive failure rates after two and three years than were predicted by any manufacturer reliability statistics.
The absolute best reference for the show’s content is this link to a PDF of Google’s research report:
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
Sean Carruthers: Inside the Lab Theme
When a lot of people think of Apple’s GarageBand application, they think of it as little more than a musical toy — sure, it’s fun to put together a number of loops and beats to create little bits of music, but it’s not exactly a professional tool, is it? Well, not so fast: in addition to the ability to put together pre-configured blocks of sound like you would with a children’s building-block set, GarageBand also offers up the ability to create your own music using the built-in software instruments, or to record real live instruments through an analogue-to-digital interface….voice, guitar, you name it.
The nicest thing about GarageBand is that the building blocks that come with the program can be used to quickly sketch out ideas, which is exactly what happened with the Lab’s new theme: initially, I threw together beats and loops that were in the kind of style, mood and tempo we wanted to go for with the theme, with the eventual goal of having someone give us something in a similar style.
Eventually, however, I started replacing the pre-fab loops with software instruments played on the Mac’s own keyboard, and with a bit of cleanup work and removal of the original loops, we ended up with something that was similar in feel to the loops originally laid down, but now with my own musical passages in place of the more generic loops. Then, you add some effects to the instruments (echo, a bit of distortion, compression, etc), and the instruments change even more from the generic items found in GarageBand…you literally have a ton of control over what you’re doing once you delve into the program, which means you can use it as a rough sketching tool if that’s what you prefer, but it’s also perfectly capable of creating fully-fleshed out pieces of music, if you have the RAM and processor to keep your project rolling in real time.
During the episode, we mentioned that we'd make the GarageBand file available for the Lab with Leo theme available for our viewers to tinker with...well, here it is. We've removed the beats and other GarageBand sounds (to make sure we're not redistributing Apple's loops), so here's your chance to customize the beat and add your own sounds to create your very own version of the theme!
