Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

A few days ago I was emailed by someone who had a few questions about upgrading an old laptop they’ve had for several years. They were very certain that they needed a larger hard drive but had heard of “RAM” (Random Access Memory) and didn’t know if it was something different or the same as a “hard drive”. This is a common mistake many make. To help remedy mistakes like this I like to create simple analogies to help explain how a computer works so they are easier to understand. In this particular case I like to use the human body for comparison.

So let’s imagine that instead of a computer we were talking about the human body.  The parts between the human body and computers that would roughly equal each other would be:

CPU = The math-crunching part of your brain.

RAM = Your short term memory.  Stuff in here is being thought about right now and is instantly available to the CPU if needed.

Hard Drive = Not so much a part of your brain as it is a thick book being held in your hand.  Like a book, it requires you to actually LOOK at it to get information out of it, which requires you to also use your other hand to thumb through its thousands of pages and use a pencil and eraser to add or remove information from it; lots of physical hand movement going on here.  It is similar to your own long-term memory.  Information stays here after you shut the computer off or go to sleep, but takes longer to recall and longer to write into than RAM.

For reference, here is a short video showing off the inside of a hard drive while it is working.  Think about the book and your hands thumbing through and writing/erasing pages while watching this video:

In computers, RAM consists of little chips that do not contain any moving parts but can store information temporarily while the computer is powered on.  Data can be read from and written into RAM in a matter of nanoseconds at rates as fast as or faster than a gigabyte per second, primarily because there are no moving parts, just like the CPU (or the human brain).  In a very real way, RAM and the CPU are like different parts of a brain that work in concert to produce results quickly.

When a computer is told to load a program, it has to copy that program it into RAM for later use.  In the human body, “loading a program” would be kind of like opening that thick book I mentioned earlier to a chapter like, oh I don’t know, “Chess:  Instructions and Rules.”  If you can remember all the instructions and rules right after reading them for the first time, then you can play the game without any need to stop and read the manual every time it’s your turn.   Likewise, if a computer is able to load a program into RAM completely, then it won’t have much need to access the hard drive after it’s been loaded.

In the old days, if you didn’t have enough RAM to load your software into, it simply wouldn’t run at all.  This isn’t true these days because modern operating systems use a feature called “Virtual Memory” (or “swap space”) where free space on the hard drive is used as a sort of simulated fake RAM.  This would be kind of like taking that book, turning it to the back where the pages are blank, and taking notes… a LOT of notes.  This leads to the dreaded hard drive “grind” (that sound you hear when the hard drives is constantly doing something; that KRRRRRRRR sound) where the hard drive is so overwhelmed with reading and writing information that the entire system slows to a crawl while it waits for the hard drive to finish whatever it’s doing.  In humans, this would be kind of like trying to do taxes for 20 corporations at the same time; you’d practically wish you were dead.

Fortunately, RAM can be easily upgraded and these days it’s one of the most economic ways to improve your computers performance and postpone its obsolescence.   With more RAM, your computer can load larger, more complex programs and relieve your hard drive from the daunting task of pretending to be RAM.

I had a major streak of creative energy after lifting weights earlier today and made this in about 5 hours time.  It’s a work in progress.  It’s easily in there with the Psytrance genre.  Enjoy!

Some of you might know me to be a bit of a Linux geek who is a sucker for the open-source philosophy and culture.  It sure is a beautiful thing in the world of computers; using software that’s free of charge and free to modify because a bunch of people decided to give it away to the public and do whatever they want with it.   This has worked out VERY well for Linux since it began, with bored programmers using the Internet as a global workbench to approach and tinker with any software they wanted and the best results would come to the surface as a new standard, often with no money changing hands.

It’s difficult for most people to imagine doing something like this because we don’t know a thing about computer source code.  We sort of have a foggy idea about it and could boil it down to “a list of instructions for a computer to follow” and add that those instructions can be edited and improved upon by anyone.  Any description more complex than that and it starts to sound like Greek… but for this post, it’s good enough.

Now  imagine you took this model of open-participation and applied it to music production, doing it all on the Internet.  You’re a musician, you play an instrument or have a singing talent and want to find other musicians who share your musical taste.  This is difficult to do in the real world, especially if you’re stuck in Kansas like me.  Sure, it’s easy to find a Kareoke machine on any given night if you look hard enough but finding good, original, local musicians is hard.  So the next best thing is to go online and (in a way that’s reminiscent of posting personal ads looking for a significant other) post your own creations/recordings to be judged by others… perhaps even loved by others, modified by others, built upon by others until eventually the little tune or melody you started with turns into a fleshed out composition that sounds very professional.

This is exactly the kind of situation I’ve found myself in during the last 3 weeks after I did some searching on google for “online music collaboration” and discovered Kompoz.com and indabamusic.com.

I signed up for both at the same time and uploaded the same music (three songs of my own) to both sites.  All I had to do after that was sit back and wait for others to possibly like my music and wish to add something to it, or not.  Over on Kompoz, in a matter of just 2 or 3 hours, a fellow from Latvia named Nikitt had uploaded a new guitar track to one of my songs on Kompoz.  Within a few days after that I was getting emails from people wanting to perform lyrics to the track.    A few days later, another astonishing guitar track was added by a dude from Florida who calls himself Grumpy.  And in all this time, none of the tracks I uploaded to Indaba got even a hint of attention or interest from anybody.  So either they think my music sucks over at that website or (more likely) the user interface for indaba is a mess that makes it difficult for bored musicians to find new projects.  So  maybe Indaba would work for you but it certainly didn’t work for me.

But enough about Indaba failing me.  Kompoz on the other hand has really bolstered my dream of writing a lot of good music.  It’s just so much easier to be able to upload something and for someone else to come along and add an idea to it.  It really is a lot of fun; I would tell my fiance Kristin that it’s like Christmas every day because you never know what you’re going to get.  This happens in part because some of the people who use the site live on the other side of the planet and leave stuff online while you’re asleep and when you wake up you might be surprised to find new recordings uploaded or at least some productive comments.

So this is what I’ve been doing with some of my spare time lately and just wanted to share.  You can check out my Kompoz profile and projects by clicking here.  If you happen to be a musician I encourage you to join Kompoz.com with a free membership, but if you’re serious about music production it pays to get a premium membership for $50 a year so you can exchange high quality WAV files and even publish music for commercial release and get royalties out of it.