People talk about Global Warming as if it's going to end the world. The world will go on with or without humanity. Our big problems are overpopulation and that we build most of our cities near the oceans.
Someplace like Chicago, though, will have a great time of this. Mild winters, year-round growing season, and no flooding to worry about. Someplace like New York? Well, nobody said building a city at sea level was terribly bright...
The real trick here is to learn to read like you do with Chinese or similar languages. Ie - you read entire words at a time instead of letters.
The example in question took me 2-3 seconds to read reformatted. Why? Because if you read words, then each chunk is processed as a block/at once. Normally it as about 8 seconds.
A good analogy to this would be, say, having a large wad of, say, jellybeans on a table, all spread out. Now, try and grab them up as quickly as you can. Now, take the same 100 jellybeans and put them into little piles of 5. You can now easily grab a pile at once with each hand. Cleanup just got much quicker because you aren't aiming for a specific jellybean at a time but rather you grab a pile/clump at once.
If you look at the diagram, you'll see that the two rings/area our eyes scan is like this - it's not about formatting in a poetry-like method, but clumping it all in a little circle so that our eye can focus it as quickly as a single word otherwise.
Of course, as others have pointed out, if you can speed-read a line at a time, you won't find much use for this. Most people's brains hit a limit of about 1000words a minute that they can process/analyze anyways.
Going up against Apple on this one is probably the dumbest things ever for them. I seriously expect Apple to bankrupt them with lawyers and fees just out of spite. And I seriously doubt any judge would fault Apple, either. Probably laugh at their complaints would be my guess.
Moral: Don't kick the shins of the 2000lb gorilla.
It's accurate, inexpensive, and likely what the state will switch to if the E-Voting machines fail. There are card readers as well to make it easier to count, but the paper trail/cards are kept as well. Basically foolproof - with maybe a.001% margin for error in local elections at most, even after recounts.(local election of 100K+ votes - recount essentially came down to the provisional ones. This method had maybe a dozen votes change out of 100K+)
http://www.ilts.com/news_3.htm E-Voting is dead. Old-school technology is better. I'd actually suspect someone of purposely trying to rig an election if they tried to replace a system like this with touch-screen models.
My solution years ago was to search online for a utility called "reforce". This scans your video card and monitor and allows you to select the scan/refresh rate for every resolution possible.
There also is a option to make everything - all 40 modes or so 60hz. This is highly recommended as it cuts down direct X crashes and issues by at least a factor or two. All you have to do then is go to the video card and turn the V-sync on. The games will all only work at 60hz at this point as well, which increases your video speed(less to process, more available overhead for more complex scenes).
Ie - instead of the yo-yo 20fps in one area and 100 in another, you get a more stable 60 with occasional drops to 40-50 for a second or so. The net effect is a 20-30% speed difference, or easy to shrug off. The other, it's a 80% drop and our brains process this as a major slowdown.(even though we can't easily see beyond 60FPS(and comprehend it), our brains still process the information and see the tearing and so on.
What you want is a constant and smooth experience. This allows you to aim better, move better, and of course, have less headaches and eye strain.
Note - those graphs are always averages. If you look at a graph of video performance over time, it looks like a EEG or close to it in most games - so the values are often deceiving.(100+fps in some areas and 20fps in others nets 50fps. I'd rather have 50fps all the time)
I bet if you included salaried employees, all of the new companies that it recently took over/bought out, all of the part-time workers, all of the temp/contract workers, and all of the independent contractors and specialists, you would have well over 500K total worldwide employees. Maybe more if you add in all of the part-timers and outsourced call center employees.
That 350K is apparently for salaried employees only. I doubt if much more than half of their entire workforce worldwide is employed in such a manner.
350K plus their part-time employees and sub-contractors nets them a workforce of probably 450K or so total worldwide. So a 1/3 reduction while harsh, is likely exactly what they need to survive.
I was going to say this, but one other game ties it in my mind. Angband.
www.thangorodrim.net
Despite the lack of graphics, it's incredibly difficult and has AI and a random number generator that is bulletproof. It truly is infinitely replayable.
Third place would be... X-Com. Beautiful game as well and very good time-waster.
Re:And Yet... You Only Have Yourself to Blame
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 1
Other than those people who come from families which are already wealthy, nobody I know wastes their money on a college education so that they can work in manual labor or minimum wage. Blanket "we own your ass" employment agreements have become the standard in every professional industry with a history longer than fifty years-- ****
If you are that far gone economically and have only a place like Google as your option left, you have far larger problems than just being homeless.
There are plenty of well paying jobs. Take mine - there are about 40 employees. My agreement covers work-related stuff only - not my personal life, what I do, what I create, and so on. It's a perfectly liveable arrangement and I get paid well enough.
Compare this to Apple - sorry, can't so much as make a VB app to organize your music files without Apple claiming it as their own.(and it gets worse with companies like Disney).
$150-200 or so laptop without Windows. This is going to make a lot of students and home users jump ship. I see no loss at it not having Windows.
And Yet... You Only Have Yourself to Blame
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 1
Nobody ever has to really work for a company like this. If you do, well, it's like signing a pre-nup agreement. You walked in, and sold out. I feel no pity anymore. Besides, who in their right mind would marry anyone who has restrictions and such beforehand? That's not real love.
And neither are places that have NDAs real work.
There are a LOT of companies other than Apple, Google, and the rest that don't require more than a standard "don't give our trade secrets away" to work there. I suggest that people who have a problem with these sorts of NDAs do themselves a favor and find a better company to work for.
The thing is - BBC keeps complaining that their budget is so low and they need money and so on...
Why not sell this to people in the U.S. for a monthly subscription? This would generate huge profits I bet as well as have the advantage of possibly lightening the load on the taxpayer/free up some funds for other projects and needs.
As for the dish, my problem is that I'm in California - so barring some it-bounces-just-right-off-the-moon silliness, It's not going to happen.
As I read the article, I came across a problem in the basic layout of the test.
See, the writer is doing a comparison based upon how closely Ubuntu is *emulating* Windows. Every area is pretty much summed up by"windows task emulation score", so of course Vista wins.
But there are dozens, no, hundreds of things you can do with Ubuntu that you can't do with Windows as well.
So a fairer and more proper test would look at them as blank slates. Have a list of 20 or so functions that are generic, like multiprocessor support, cut/paste between applications, file/directory manipulation, and so on. Things that any OS, be it Mac, PC, *ix, or even something like and old Amiga or VMS could manage to get top scores in.(in theory at least).
I tire of "comparisons" like this. It's like trying to compare a car to a BMW 3 series handling-wise(which it probably won't win) instead of looking at the overall picture and the other things it may or may not offer. I smell yet another Cedega comparison coming up soon. And yet another example of poor analytical skills.(ie - I can name several *ix or Mac only games than Windows doesn't have - perhaps we should try to run them on Vista and then bitch and complain about how it doesn't run them?)
All this will really end up accomplishing is the internet companies moving offshore to other nations that don't recognize the RIAA. There's a real mental disconnets with the RIAA's leadership. They just don't get it that you can't legally lock down the internet because it's not a U.S. only thing.
If say, all the internet radio sites went to South Korea to do their broadcasts, which is a very nice country, actually, to do this sort of thing, the RIAA would essentially eat dirt. Zero recourse. Instead of getting a little bit of money and helping to maybe create a workable system all they have done is force the entire industry/technology offshore. It's a total bonehead move by them.
Of course, most of us know this already. This new piece of junk they are touting will be fought. I can see a *ix type open-source music copyright coming out of this. A specific copyright that disallows any recording industry to ever claim patent to a piece of music(but of course protects the original owner/ie - has to be credited). I used to be a musician myself a decade or so ago so I understand the desire for getting paid and such to make a living if you can, but given the industry's corruption, I'd gladly do something like this if I was still playing - just to spite them.
Currently my cable TV provider offers... yes - NOT ONE BBC channel. Not even the BBC America nonsense.
I'd gladly pay $40 or more per month to be able to access the BBC shows if it really included all of the channels. So would many people that I talk to. I've talked to my cable provider as well as every satellite one and there's nothing at all short of getting a 3 meter dish in on the roof(old school Satellite TV) and DIYing it to get BBC programs in the U.S.
This would be an acceptable alternative - and well worth a monthly subscription.
If a HP head clogs, all you have to do is replace the inkjet cartridge. If nozzles clog on other printers, you have to buy a new printer, if the usual self cleaning routines so not work. ****
Really? My Canon's head is removeable. Dunk it in some cleaning solution and let it dry overnight - good as new. I have "fixed" my $39 printer twice in the last three years and it still prints. Total cost for three years printing? Not even $100 including paper. Only now, after thousands of pages, is the print head wearing out. But I can buy a new one for $40 if I had to.
HP is *such* a dumb move. A shame, too, since their older laser printers(4, 5, 6 series) are fantastic workhorses that print for lower cost than anyone else.
I can get ink for a typical Canon printer for a couple of dollars because the head and tank are separate.
The price for ink bought online via InkDaddy or other sites for the Canon printers runs about 1-1.5 cents a page, or almost exactly what the cheapest laser printers cost(black), and under 3-5 cents a page for color.
By now, the PC market is saturated and MS already has 90+ percent of it. Nearly everybody who needs or wants a PC already has one. This means that there will be little growth and the market is really based on replacement of older models with newer ones. MS already has a huge market share, so they can't grow by taking share away from the competition.
And this is exactly the problem they face. It's the same one GM faced in the 80s. If you are #1 and effectively own the market you are in, it takes enormous efforts to keep from being chipped and whittled away by the competition.
Microsoft can't grow. But Apple, Ubuntuu, and a slew of others can by eating into Microsoft's share. History always favors the innovators over the status quo, so Microsoft is in big trouble because they don't really want to innovate.(never have, really - it's usually mediocre crud that works somewhat well)
This is exactly what happened to BYTE. It was the largest and most respected magazine in its field for at least an entire generation and then the new owners switched to an online model.
It went from a huge subscription to barely on anyone's radar overnight. And content - it sucks.
Sad. The end of an era. Just when role-playing games and the like are beginning to make a strong comeback. Talk about short-sighted.
The thing people seem to forget is that its only lost money if the person would buy a legitimate copy(or in this case could). If there were no copies of Vista that were copyable in the world, China would just use something else or not upgrade at all.
So Microsoft isn't losing any money with what's happening in China, despite how they may claim to be.
First off, the reason to obtain and collect vinyl recording is clear. 80-90% of all music ever released on LP/45/etc was never re-released on CD. That's an astounding amount of music that is gone - outside of a radio station or movie.
For instance, if you want a recording of most 1950s jukebox songs or even stuff like 70s rock bands... most of it wasn't ever re-released. I guess you could get one of those old-time music collections off of late-night TV, but that's equally lame.
Only two or three years ago at the clamoring of the masses of fans did Jethro Tull, for instance, release their live album in its entirety. This was one of the top 100 albums of all time but the CD chopped out all of the filler which made it good. In fact, almost every live album or double LP set in existence was ether butchered on CD or just not available outside of the "anniversary" set.
Then there's comedy. An entire genre that never made it to CD. Thousands of people and routines that are still as funny as ever... but only on record.(in many cases the artists were dead or didn't have the money to go to CD, since the 80s were dominated by the recording industry which shut you down if you didn't have huge sales. Monty Python for instance - half of their stuff isn't on CD, even today.
Or obscure classics like the original BBC version of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Tape and LP only. Finding it on CD... yeah, right. Yet it's one of the best things ever recorded - better than the lame movie that's for sure. There are several audio versions, but not the original radio drama.
And then there's the entire library of music from Motown Records. Thousands of albums... company died at the beginning of the CD era. Yes, there's a revival of the company recently, but it's "classic" - basically the few most famous groups. If you weren't a superstar... sorry.
So it's not just old classical or stuff like Donny Osmond that was on LP. It's an astounding mountain of stuff. Everyone should have a tape deck or record player. The USB is nice, though, since there is software to get rid of the artifacts and problems digitally, then you can encode it at maximum quality to your hard drive(I suggest LAME plus 320K dual-channel stereo at a minimum)
Getting to the solutions: 1: www.dak.com - this was an old company that sold all sorts of oddball audio gear in the 80s. he's back and his software package for recording LPs to digital is probably the most affordable that I know of. You absolutely need a RIAA conversion box unless your amplifier has a phono in/on inside it or the audio will sound quite bad. (they compressed the sound before recording and the circuit de-compresses it to proper levels).
2:www.grado.com - toss the stylus. Get the $80 green one. This sounds virtually identical to their silver and gold models for a reasonable price.(the $60 one, the black is okay. The $80 "green" one is culled out of the blacks by testing to be the top 10% of the black line. the trick is that the hand-picked black models sound as good as the stock sliver models that cost 3-4 times as much.
This humble cartridge beats out $300-$500 audiophile ones. You get huge sound for cheap.(same with grado's headphones - the 60 and 80 are their budget, but sound better/virtually the same as anything under $300(even Grado's other models))
Enjoy - go to old garage sales and record stores and buy almost anything. The software will correct most of the flaws and you can resell the LPs once you are happy with the results - so that someone else can enjoy the music.
The most likely reason that I have run across is due to genetically modified crops. Their pollen is filled with the same herbicides and pesticides that the plants themselves are(the wheat/corn/etc less so) and it's poisoning them in great numbers.
The GM corn in question was only planted 6 years ago and now accounts for more than half of the U.S. crop. This coincides with the problem almost exactly.
Moral: Don't try this in Europe. Oh, wait, they don't and the bees are just fine...
Nice post. The other thing that I would do, and I was shocked that Vista didn't finally deal with was making all of the ports closed by default at the most basic level(ie - not hackable - it's all shut off by default)
Now, if you really want a secure box, you could of course run your email/news/etc on a small VMS box. I doubt it there's even one VMS virus anymore. I doubt if the script kiddies would even know how to even locate a virus or bot for VMS anymore(or even the old-timers)
Makes for a dandy email server, too - everything evil just implodes the second it tries to do anything at all. Everyone, IMO, should have their own email server running on an old 486 or otherwise thrown away box. Infinitely more secure than running it all locally.
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People talk about Global Warming as if it's going to end the world. The world will go on with or without humanity. Our big problems are overpopulation and that we build most of our cities near the oceans.
Someplace like Chicago, though, will have a great time of this. Mild winters, year-round growing season, and no flooding to worry about. Someplace like New York? Well, nobody said building a city at sea level was terribly bright...
The real trick here is to learn to read like you do with Chinese or similar languages. Ie - you read entire words at a time instead of letters.
The example in question took me 2-3 seconds to read reformatted. Why? Because if you read words, then each chunk is processed as a block/at once. Normally it as about 8 seconds.
A good analogy to this would be, say, having a large wad of, say, jellybeans on a table, all spread out. Now, try and grab them up as quickly as you can. Now, take the same 100 jellybeans and put them into little piles of 5. You can now easily grab a pile at once with each hand. Cleanup just got much quicker because you aren't aiming for a specific jellybean at a time but rather you grab a pile/clump at once.
If you look at the diagram, you'll see that the two rings/area our eyes scan is like this - it's not about formatting in a poetry-like method, but clumping it all in a little circle so that our eye can focus it as quickly as a single word otherwise.
Of course, as others have pointed out, if you can speed-read a line at a time, you won't find much use for this. Most people's brains hit a limit of about 1000words a minute that they can process/analyze anyways.
Going up against Apple on this one is probably the dumbest things ever for them. I seriously expect Apple to bankrupt them with lawyers and fees just out of spite. And I seriously doubt any judge would fault Apple, either. Probably laugh at their complaints would be my guess.
Moral: Don't kick the shins of the 2000lb gorilla.
The decision to market Unix(specific distro aside) as a separate OS entirely is the right one.
Windows. Check.
Mac. Check.
Ubuntu. Check.
This reminds me of a decade ago when you had Atari, Amiga, and a few other 16 bit computers all competing. All having strengths and weaknesses.
"Oh look - here's a box that can run Windows junk for les money" completely misses the point. Dell is right to stick to their guns on this one.
Most of Los Angeles County(where I live - sigh) uses this system instead of computers:
.001% margin for error in local elections at most, even after recounts.(local election of 100K+ votes - recount essentially came down to the provisional ones. This method had maybe a dozen votes change out of 100K+)
http://www.inkavote.com/
It's accurate, inexpensive, and likely what the state will switch to if the E-Voting machines fail. There are card readers as well to make it easier to count, but the paper trail/cards are kept as well. Basically foolproof - with maybe a
http://www.ilts.com/news_3.htm
E-Voting is dead. Old-school technology is better. I'd actually suspect someone of purposely trying to rig an election if they tried to replace a system like this with touch-screen models.
My solution years ago was to search online for a utility called "reforce". This scans your video card and monitor and allows you to select the scan/refresh rate for every resolution possible.
There also is a option to make everything - all 40 modes or so 60hz. This is highly recommended as it cuts down direct X crashes and issues by at least a factor or two. All you have to do then is go to the video card and turn the V-sync on. The games will all only work at 60hz at this point as well, which increases your video speed(less to process, more available overhead for more complex scenes).
Ie - instead of the yo-yo 20fps in one area and 100 in another, you get a more stable 60 with occasional drops to 40-50 for a second or so. The net effect is a 20-30% speed difference, or easy to shrug off. The other, it's a 80% drop and our brains process this as a major slowdown.(even though we can't easily see beyond 60FPS(and comprehend it), our brains still process the information and see the tearing and so on.
What you want is a constant and smooth experience. This allows you to aim better, move better, and of course, have less headaches and eye strain.
Note - those graphs are always averages. If you look at a graph of video performance over time, it looks like a EEG or close to it in most games - so the values are often deceiving.(100+fps in some areas and 20fps in others nets 50fps. I'd rather have 50fps all the time)
I bet if you included salaried employees, all of the new companies that it recently took over/bought out, all of the part-time workers, all of the temp/contract workers, and all of the independent contractors and specialists, you would have well over 500K total worldwide employees. Maybe more if you add in all of the part-timers and outsourced call center employees.
That 350K is apparently for salaried employees only. I doubt if much more than half of their entire workforce worldwide is employed in such a manner.
350K plus their part-time employees and sub-contractors nets them a workforce of probably 450K or so total worldwide. So a 1/3 reduction while harsh, is likely exactly what they need to survive.
I was going to say this, but one other game ties it in my mind. Angband.
www.thangorodrim.net
Despite the lack of graphics, it's incredibly difficult and has AI and a random number generator that is bulletproof. It truly is infinitely replayable.
Third place would be... X-Com. Beautiful game as well and very good time-waster.
Other than those people who come from families which are already wealthy, nobody I know wastes their money on a college education so that they can work in manual labor or minimum wage. Blanket "we own your ass" employment agreements have become the standard in every professional industry with a history longer than fifty years--
****
If you are that far gone economically and have only a place like Google as your option left, you have far larger problems than just being homeless.
There are plenty of well paying jobs. Take mine - there are about 40 employees. My agreement covers work-related stuff only - not my personal life, what I do, what I create, and so on. It's a perfectly liveable arrangement and I get paid well enough.
Compare this to Apple - sorry, can't so much as make a VB app to organize your music files without Apple claiming it as their own.(and it gets worse with companies like Disney).
I said no - and I'm perfectly happy.
The sad truth is that it DOES all exist.
My copy of Zone Alarm(not the only app I use, either), has logged 1,640,000 attempts to get into my computer in the last SIX months.
We sure as hell do need such an industry. I'm not trusting that the hackers will go away when I see levels like that.
$150-200 or so laptop without Windows. This is going to make a lot of students and home users jump ship. I see no loss at it not having Windows.
Nobody ever has to really work for a company like this. If you do, well, it's like signing a pre-nup agreement. You walked in, and sold out. I feel no pity anymore. Besides, who in their right mind would marry anyone who has restrictions and such beforehand? That's not real love.
And neither are places that have NDAs real work.
There are a LOT of companies other than Apple, Google, and the rest that don't require more than a standard "don't give our trade secrets away" to work there. I suggest that people who have a problem with these sorts of NDAs do themselves a favor and find a better company to work for.
The thing is - BBC keeps complaining that their budget is so low and they need money and so on...
Why not sell this to people in the U.S. for a monthly subscription? This would generate huge profits I bet as well as have the advantage of possibly lightening the load on the taxpayer/free up some funds for other projects and needs.
As for the dish, my problem is that I'm in California - so barring some it-bounces-just-right-off-the-moon silliness, It's not going to happen.
As I read the article, I came across a problem in the basic layout of the test.
See, the writer is doing a comparison based upon how closely Ubuntu is *emulating* Windows. Every area is pretty much summed up by"windows task emulation score", so of course Vista wins.
But there are dozens, no, hundreds of things you can do with Ubuntu that you can't do with Windows as well.
So a fairer and more proper test would look at them as blank slates. Have a list of 20 or so functions that are generic, like multiprocessor support, cut/paste between applications, file/directory manipulation, and so on. Things that any OS, be it Mac, PC, *ix, or even something like and old Amiga or VMS could manage to get top scores in.(in theory at least).
I tire of "comparisons" like this. It's like trying to compare a car to a BMW 3 series handling-wise(which it probably won't win) instead of looking at the overall picture and the other things it may or may not offer. I smell yet another Cedega comparison coming up soon. And yet another example of poor analytical skills.(ie - I can name several *ix or Mac only games than Windows doesn't have - perhaps we should try to run them on Vista and then bitch and complain about how it doesn't run them?)
All this will really end up accomplishing is the internet companies moving offshore to other nations that don't recognize the RIAA. There's a real mental disconnets with the RIAA's leadership. They just don't get it that you can't legally lock down the internet because it's not a U.S. only thing.
If say, all the internet radio sites went to South Korea to do their broadcasts, which is a very nice country, actually, to do this sort of thing, the RIAA would essentially eat dirt. Zero recourse. Instead of getting a little bit of money and helping to maybe create a workable system all they have done is force the entire industry/technology offshore. It's a total bonehead move by them.
Of course, most of us know this already. This new piece of junk they are touting will be fought. I can see a *ix type open-source music copyright coming out of this. A specific copyright that disallows any recording industry to ever claim patent to a piece of music(but of course protects the original owner/ie - has to be credited). I used to be a musician myself a decade or so ago so I understand the desire for getting paid and such to make a living if you can, but given the industry's corruption, I'd gladly do something like this if I was still playing - just to spite them.
Currently my cable TV provider offers... yes - NOT ONE BBC channel. Not even the BBC America nonsense.
I'd gladly pay $40 or more per month to be able to access the BBC shows if it really included all of the channels. So would many people that I talk to. I've talked to my cable provider as well as every satellite one and there's nothing at all short of getting a 3 meter dish in on the roof(old school Satellite TV) and DIYing it to get BBC programs in the U.S.
This would be an acceptable alternative - and well worth a monthly subscription.
If a HP head clogs, all you have to do is replace the inkjet cartridge. If nozzles clog on other printers, you have to buy a new printer, if the usual self cleaning routines so not work.
****
Really? My Canon's head is removeable. Dunk it in some cleaning solution and let it dry overnight - good as new. I have "fixed" my $39 printer twice in the last three years and it still prints. Total cost for three years printing? Not even $100 including paper. Only now, after thousands of pages, is the print head wearing out. But I can buy a new one for $40 if I had to.
HP is *such* a dumb move. A shame, too, since their older laser printers(4, 5, 6 series) are fantastic workhorses that print for lower cost than anyone else.
I can get ink for a typical Canon printer for a couple of dollars because the head and tank are separate.
The price for ink bought online via InkDaddy or other sites for the Canon printers runs about 1-1.5 cents a page, or almost exactly what the cheapest laser printers cost(black), and under 3-5 cents a page for color.
By now, the PC market is saturated and MS already has 90+ percent of it. Nearly everybody who needs or wants a PC already has one. This means that there will be little growth and the market is really based on replacement of older models with newer ones. MS already has a huge market share, so they can't grow by taking share away from the competition.
And this is exactly the problem they face. It's the same one GM faced in the 80s. If you are #1 and effectively own the market you are in, it takes enormous efforts to keep from being chipped and whittled away by the competition.
Microsoft can't grow. But Apple, Ubuntuu, and a slew of others can by eating into Microsoft's share. History always favors the innovators over the status quo, so Microsoft is in big trouble because they don't really want to innovate.(never have, really - it's usually mediocre crud that works somewhat well)
This is exactly what happened to BYTE. It was the largest and most respected magazine in its field for at least an entire generation and then the new owners switched to an online model.
It went from a huge subscription to barely on anyone's radar overnight. And content - it sucks.
Sad. The end of an era. Just when role-playing games and the like are beginning to make a strong comeback. Talk about short-sighted.
The thing people seem to forget is that its only lost money if the person would buy a legitimate copy(or in this case could). If there were no copies of Vista that were copyable in the world, China would just use something else or not upgrade at all.
So Microsoft isn't losing any money with what's happening in China, despite how they may claim to be.
First off, the reason to obtain and collect vinyl recording is clear. 80-90% of all music ever released on LP/45/etc was never re-released on CD. That's an astounding amount of music that is gone - outside of a radio station or movie.
t ml
For instance, if you want a recording of most 1950s jukebox songs or even stuff like 70s rock bands... most of it wasn't ever re-released. I guess you could get one of those old-time music collections off of late-night TV, but that's equally lame.
Only two or three years ago at the clamoring of the masses of fans did Jethro Tull, for instance, release their live album in its entirety. This was one of the top 100 albums of all time but the CD chopped out all of the filler which made it good. In fact, almost every live album or double LP set in existence was ether butchered on CD or just not available outside of the "anniversary" set.
Then there's comedy. An entire genre that never made it to CD. Thousands of people and routines that are still as funny as ever... but only on record.(in many cases the artists were dead or didn't have the money to go to CD, since the 80s were dominated by the recording industry which shut you down if you didn't have huge sales. Monty Python for instance - half of their stuff isn't on CD, even today.
Or obscure classics like the original BBC version of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Tape and LP only. Finding it on CD... yeah, right. Yet it's one of the best things ever recorded - better than the lame movie that's for sure. There are several audio versions, but not the original radio drama.
And then there's the entire library of music from Motown Records. Thousands of albums... company died at the beginning of the CD era. Yes, there's a revival of the company recently, but it's "classic" - basically the few most famous groups. If you weren't a superstar... sorry.
So it's not just old classical or stuff like Donny Osmond that was on LP. It's an astounding mountain of stuff. Everyone should have a tape deck or record player. The USB is nice, though, since there is software to get rid of the artifacts and problems digitally, then you can encode it at maximum quality to your hard drive(I suggest LAME plus 320K dual-channel stereo at a minimum)
Getting to the solutions:
1: www.dak.com - this was an old company that sold all sorts of oddball audio gear in the 80s. he's back and his software package for recording LPs to digital is probably the most affordable that I know of. You absolutely need a RIAA conversion box unless your amplifier has a phono in/on inside it or the audio will sound quite bad. (they compressed the sound before recording and the circuit de-compresses it to proper levels).
2:www.grado.com - toss the stylus. Get the $80 green one. This sounds virtually identical to their silver and gold models for a reasonable price.(the $60 one, the black is okay. The $80 "green" one is culled out of the blacks by testing to be the top 10% of the black line. the trick is that the hand-picked black models sound as good as the stock sliver models that cost 3-4 times as much.
This humble cartridge beats out $300-$500 audiophile ones. You get huge sound for cheap.(same with grado's headphones - the 60 and 80 are their budget, but sound better/virtually the same as anything under $300(even Grado's other models))
3: http://www.teresaudio.com/haven/cleaner/cleaner.h
This is a good DIY project that will clean most any record spotless. No need to spend $300 on a commercially available model.
Enjoy - go to old garage sales and record stores and buy almost anything. The software will correct most of the flaws and you can resell the LPs once you are happy with the results - so that someone else can enjoy the music.
The most likely reason that I have run across is due to genetically modified crops. Their pollen is filled with the same herbicides and pesticides that the plants themselves are(the wheat/corn/etc less so) and it's poisoning them in great numbers.
The GM corn in question was only planted 6 years ago and now accounts for more than half of the U.S. crop. This coincides with the problem almost exactly.
Moral: Don't try this in Europe. Oh, wait, they don't and the bees are just fine...
Nice post. The other thing that I would do, and I was shocked that Vista didn't finally deal with was making all of the ports closed by default at the most basic level(ie - not hackable - it's all shut off by default)
Now, if you really want a secure box, you could of course run your email/news/etc on a small VMS box. I doubt it there's even one VMS virus anymore. I doubt if the script kiddies would even know how to even locate a virus or bot for VMS anymore(or even the old-timers)
Makes for a dandy email server, too - everything evil just implodes the second it tries to do anything at all. Everyone, IMO, should have their own email server running on an old 486 or otherwise thrown away box. Infinitely more secure than running it all locally.