Tag: quorum

Jul 27

Meet Old East Dallas’ maker of musical gadgets

The first musical gadget Richard Upchurch made was a gift for his four-year-old nephew — it was a simple wooden box with a button to record a sound, a button to play it back and a knob to speed up or slow down the audio .

“I call it anti-technology technology,” said Upchurch, who toured for years as a guitarist.

The "Loopy Lou" voice recorder created by Upchurch is BrandNewNoise's best selling device.
The “Loopy Lou” voice recorder created by Upchurch is BrandNewNoise’s best selling device.(Richard Upchurch)

His nephew showed it to his teachers, who wanted to buy one, so Upchurch made five more. Over a decade later, Upchurch now makes the contracts full-time for his Dallas-based company, BrandNewNoise.

What started with an “old-school tape recorder concept in this playful box,” he said, now includes a range of handmade “experimental instruments,” including miniaturized pianos, harmonicas and xylophones, all of which have recording capabilities. The bestseller, Loopy Lou, runs $72.25, and resembles the toy he made his nephew those many years ago.

“People are like, ‘Who’s it for?’ And I was like, ‘Well, it’s for 4-year-olds and rock stars,’” says Upchurch, who opened a workshop for BrandNewNoise in Old East Dallas in 2017. “They’re kind of the same person. They’re curious, free minds.”

The list of rockstar clientele, indeed, is long. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac and country star Brad Paisley all count themselves among Upchurch’s patrons. But why, when these A-list musicians have access to cutting-edge, industry-grade audio equipment?

“There’s a freedom and charm to the simplicity,” said Upchurch. “Yes, you can probably do this on your iPhone. But there’s something about the fact that what I make is singular in its use, and it sounds unique, and it’s tactile, and it’s immediate.”

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Jul 12

Data Oriented Programming in Java

Key Takeaways

  • Project Amber has brought a number of new features to Java in recent years. While each of these features are self-contained, they are also designed to work together. Specifically, records, sealed classes, and pattern matching work together to enable easier data-oriented programming in Java.

  • OOP encourages us to model complex entities and processes using objects, which combine state and behavior. OOP is at its best when it is defining and defending boundaries. 

  • Java’s strong static typing and class-based modeling can still be tremendously useful for smaller programs, just in different ways.

  • Data-oriented programming encourages us to model data as (immutable) data, and keep the code that embodies the business logic of how we act on that data separately. Records, sealed classes, and pattern matching, make that easier.

  • When we’re modeling complex entities, OO techniques have a lot to offer us. But when we’re modeling simple services that process plain, ad-hoc data, the techniques of data-oriented programming may offer us a straighter path.

  • The techniques of OOP and data-oriented programming are not at odds; they are different tools for different granularities and situations. We can freely mix and match them as we see fit.

Project Amber has brought a number of new features to Java in recent years — local variable type inference, text blocks, records, sealed classes, pattern matching, and more. While each of these features are self-contained, they are also designed to work together. Specifically, records, sealed classes, and pattern matching work together to enable easier data-oriented programming in Java. In this article, we’ll cover what is meant by this term and how it might affect how we program in Java.

Object-oriented programming

The goal of any programming paradigm is to manage complexity. But complexity comes in many forms, and not all paradigms handle all forms of complexity equally well. Most programming paradigms have a one-sentence slogan of the form “Everything is a …”; for OOP, this is obviously “everything is an object.” Functional programming says “everything is a function”; actor-based systems say “everything is an actor”, etc. (Of course, these are all overstatements for effect.)

OOP encourages us to model complex entities and processes using objects, which combine state and behavior. OOP encourages encapsulation (object behavior mediates access to object state) and polymorphism (multiple kinds of entities can be interacted with using a common interface or vocabulary), though the mechanisms for accomplishing these goals vary across OO languages. When modeling the world with objects, we are encouraged to think in terms of is-a (a savings account is-a bank account) and has-a (a savings account has-a owner and account number) relationships.

While some developers take pleasure in loudly declaring object-oriented programming to be a failed experiment, the truth is more subtle; like all tools, it is well-suited to some things and less well-suited to others. OOP done badly can be awful, and a lot of people have been exposed to OOP principles taken to ridiculous extremes. (Rants

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Jun 21

US Army terminates science and technology effort for strategic long-range cannon

WASHINGTON — The US Army has decided to cancel the science and technology research effort that could have led to a program to develop a strategic long-range cannon, the service confirmed.

Long-range precision fires is a top priority for the Army when it comes to developing a modernized force capable of facing off against advanced adversaries like China. The cannon could’ve provided a way to achieve artillery ranges of 1,000 nautical miles.

Congress directed the Army to stop funding the weapon in its fiscal 2022 appropriations act, and “based on that direction, the Secretary of the Army decided to terminate the [strategic long-range cannon] project this year,” Army spokesperson Ellen Lovett said in a May 20 statement to Defense News.

The decision also “eliminates potential redundancy, and ensures we effectively use tax dollars to achieve modernization objectives,” she wrote. “Pursuing the effort could cost billions of dollars even if the science and technology effort succeeded because the Army would have to enter into a development program, procure the system, and create entirely new units to operate it.”

The Army still has four other long-range fires programs set to reach operational Army units in 2023: the Extended Range Cannon Artillery, the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, a midrange anti-ship missile and the Precision Strike Missile.

“Any unused funds originally allocated to LRC [the long-range cannon] will be reapplied against other S&T projects in accordance with the direction of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisitions, Logistics and Technology,” Lovett stated.

During a House Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee hearing last week, Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told lawmakers the decision to cancel the S&T effort for the strategic long-range cannon was to avoid “redundancy” and “potential cost implications.”

Although full cost estimates are not normally made for programs in the S&T phase, Bush noted: “We did feel we had sufficient information based on similar programs that are in development and to understand the rough scope of such an effort, and the secretary believes that was enough information to support her decision.”

Some work on the cannon’s S&T effort was ongoing, but the Army had mostly taken a pause as it waited for a National Academy of Sciences report on the weapon’s technical feasibility, Brig. Gene. John Rafferty, who oversees the service’s long-range precision fires development, told Defense News in March 2021.

The independent study, congressionally mandated in FY20, was expected to be released last year, but was not yet made public by press time. Beginning in September 2020, the committee at the National Academy of Sciences held five meetings, the last of which took place in January 2021, according to its website.

According to FY21 budget justification documents, the Army planned to spend roughly $70 million in FY22 on advanced development of the program, but subsequent documents from FY22 and FY23 showed no plan to continue funding the effort beyond FY21.

The Army spent $62 million in FY21 to assess various aspects of the technology needed for the long-range cannon.

Jen

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