And this is exactly why people should not trust the cloud.
'The cloud' is a fancy way of saying, "somebody else's computer". And they can control what stays on their computer. They control what security (if any) is in place to protect your data.
Linux has the super low end and the super high end well covered, but it has a few serious areas that are lacking.
On the low end, OpenShot definitely beats windows movie maker, and it's about as good as iMovie, so for vloggers, it's all you'd need.
On the high end, Lightworks and Cinelerra are both powerful, comparable to Avid, but less stable, and the learning curve is steep; too steep for an amateur who is just messing around to master quickly.
But for a start up or mid-range video production company, neither option is acceptable. OpenShot is simply not good enough for their needs, and the high end is too much, the training costs for employees would be significant. There is no Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, or Final Cut 7 for the mid range companies to work with.
I've also had trouble rendering to h.264 in Linux. The files are sometimes corrupt - refusing to load in anything other than VLC, sometimes lacking features, like progressive upload that is youtube friendly, or just plain poor quality - not all renderers are made equal, some look better at a given bit rate than others.
"Projects like OpenHatch will even help you match your skill set to a project in need. So what's holding you back? Time? Lack of interest? Difficulty getting started?"
Not knowing about OpenHatch until just now may be a part of it.
As an artist, I've contributed a fair amount of material to the creative commons ecosystem, and I've posted some tutorials for open source projects that have a small user base, but other than that, I have no way of knowing what skills of mine could be useful to anyone working on a project, or what holes they need filled.
I purchased my first ebook reader just 8 days ago, (Sony PRS-T1 for $50) and installed calibre (0.9.18 is the version currently in the ubuntu repository) this morning, and I am very impressed with this piece of software, but a little intimidated by the interface, so I will look forward to testing out this new version.
The original reason for limited-edition prints wasn't driven by marketing. The stone or wood block would physically degrade with each print, and after a certain number of runs, the drop in quality was clearly visible (why earlier editions tend to be worth more)
With digital reproduction, this just isn't a factor any more, and limiting the production run is pure marketing; creating an artificial scarcity to inflate the price.
Most of this announcement is just empty art jargon; the elite paying lip service to their vision of the unwashed masses, framing things so the academics won't slam them too harshly, while still walking away with bags of money.
"A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation" Wow! that's slightly more radiation than you'd get from a flight over the ocean! Let's all freak out!
"In addition up to 300 tonnes a day of contaminated water is leaking from reactors buildings into the sea" So...how contaminated is this water? the same as the puddles? More? Less? What is it contaminated by?
Code wise, It's about 99% the same as Arduino, so all the libraries and code you can find out there is usable, (you just have to tweak the pin numbers) You can program Arduino boards, wiring boards, AND Atmel chips with the wiring software. The Wiring S board is slightly cheaper.
And, best of all, the help system is just a lot of commented out descriptions above the code - and it links to a schematic so you know EXACTLY what to build to make the code in the example work.
As more countries adopt English as a second language, they are adopting not our convoluted ambiguous mess of a language, but a simplified, neater version of the language that is more suited for clearly expressing technical instructions - eg. close (not open) vs. close (adjacent too)
Unlike languages like French or Korean which have centralized linguistics planning authorities to determine what is and is not correct, English is more of an "anything goes" system where lexiconographers look at what words we use and how we use them, *then* put them in the dictionary. When 1 billion Chinese, 1 Billion Indians and 1 Billion Africans all start using a standardized "Simple English" over the 350 million of us who speak what we think of as "real English", (and the 70-odd million who speak that odd variant of the language over in Britain) one side will have to make a change, and numbers aren't on our side.
Could you pick up some robertson screwdrivers as well? Last time I shipped a crate to the US, they used crowbars to open it up.
Whenever I ship something big to the US, I make a point to attach a note to the outside of the crate warning them about the Robertson screws, and informing them that for their convenience, I have included a pack of Robertson bits inside the crate.
It isn't just a simple matter of teaching metric either. All these industries and their supporting industries must switch or provide parallel measures (of course, the old timers will stick to imperial in that case, since it's there too). That's very, very, very expensive both in material and time.
That sounds like something that will require a lot of work, and will require hiring a lot of people to do that work. If only there was an unemployment problem in America...
Games that are easy to hack and mod are a great start - they are tweaking something they already love. I wasted many hours of my elementary school days tweaking the rules.ini file to make command and conquer's AI a more capable opponent. That lead to scripting one player levels in an attempt to make my own campaign. That lead to...nothing at all....but it might be a start.
The tools available today seem a lot more complex, but also a lot more open than they were when I was young.
I've never used medicinal marijuana (or other prescription pain killers) first hand, but the general consensus I get from people who have is that when they are in genuine pain, the substances make them feel better. When the substances start making them feel high instead of better, they know they are on the road to recovery and can cut back the dosage until it hurts again.
Considering how overdosing on marijuana is impossible in practice, I don't see the lack of precision in dose measurements is a problem. Even if marijuana use turned out to be completely useless medically, it is harmless enough that it's use as a placebo should not be infringed upon.
A 3dB increase represents twice as much "power", but the human ear does not perceive the increase in quite the same way. About 10 dB is perceived as "twice as loud."
Does this work backwards?
Does this mean that a 3db reduction in volume won't really be noticeably quieter, but would make the music about 8 times less damaging to my ears?
I'd start with the TNG episode I, Borg. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Borg)
Recap: The Enterprise adopts a stray young borgling and raises it aboard their ship, giving it a sense of individuality.
I've had 3 female roommates fall in love with this adorable character, and spark enough interest in them to watch a few more episodes - 2 of them are now hooked on Trek.
I don't want to make this sound like I am disagreeing with you in principle, because I do value software freedom, but when I get a tablet or a smartphone, I expect it to just work out-of-the-box. These things excel at being consumption machines, not production machines.
The target audience isn't necessarily a tech savvy one. The more the user is allowed to do, the higher the potential for mishaps. When you promise a customer a fancy piece of shiny hardware and advertise it like a high-tech toaster - "press here, then magic happens" they aren't expecting a full blown PC with all the associated quirks, tweaks, gradual cluttering/slowing down/ buggyness, etc. They are expecting a magic little plastic box that does all the things that were printed on the outside of the big cardboard box it arrived in.
Every additional copy of whatever-it-is is more junk, more clutter, more slowdowns, and the device will not run as advertised for long, by locking things down, it lets the manufacturer ensure the device works the way they want it to until they make it obsolete. If I want a device that works the way I want it to, I stay away from Apple, tablets and smart phones, and get a real computer.
Slashdot Mirror
When a human doctor makes a mistake, they might learn from it and know better for next time.
When an AI makes a mistake, every single system connected to the network might learn from it and know better for next time.
And once an AI reaches superhuman levels of performance, it's safe to assume it will stay better.
I am hopeful there will be some rapid advancement in this field.
And this is exactly why people should not trust the cloud.
'The cloud' is a fancy way of saying, "somebody else's computer". And they can control what stays on their computer. They control what security (if any) is in place to protect your data.
These services and companies can not be trusted.
Historically, Windows isn't stable until about the 2nd service pack, years after it's official release.
Thank you for the suggestion; I'm installing it in the background and I am going to try this out shortly.
Sony Vegas is pretty much the only program I use that still requires Windows.
It's powerful, easy to self teach, and until 10 came around, it was extremely stable.
But if your video card is anything newer than the GTX 500 series, don't expect any GPU rendering assistance.
Linux has the super low end and the super high end well covered, but it has a few serious areas that are lacking.
On the low end, OpenShot definitely beats windows movie maker, and it's about as good as iMovie, so for vloggers, it's all you'd need.
On the high end, Lightworks and Cinelerra are both powerful, comparable to Avid, but less stable, and the learning curve is steep; too steep for an amateur who is just messing around to master quickly.
But for a start up or mid-range video production company, neither option is acceptable. OpenShot is simply not good enough for their needs, and the high end is too much, the training costs for employees would be significant. There is no Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, or Final Cut 7 for the mid range companies to work with.
I've also had trouble rendering to h.264 in Linux. The files are sometimes corrupt - refusing to load in anything other than VLC, sometimes lacking features, like progressive upload that is youtube friendly, or just plain poor quality - not all renderers are made equal, some look better at a given bit rate than others.
"Projects like OpenHatch will even help you match your skill set to a project in need. So what's holding you back? Time? Lack of interest? Difficulty getting started?"
Not knowing about OpenHatch until just now may be a part of it.
As an artist, I've contributed a fair amount of material to the creative commons ecosystem, and I've posted some tutorials for open source projects that have a small user base, but other than that, I have no way of knowing what skills of mine could be useful to anyone working on a project, or what holes they need filled.
As soon as the open source world produces something better than h.264, I'm sure everyone will rush to adopt it.
Lots of people just want a tool that works, not a tool that functions better as an ideological statement than as a media player.
I click the link, video looks decent enough, loads fast enough.
"So academia is just like the rest of the world, then."
Not exactly. The reports in academia are much more long-winded.
I purchased my first ebook reader just 8 days ago, (Sony PRS-T1 for $50) and installed calibre (0.9.18 is the version currently in the ubuntu repository) this morning, and I am very impressed with this piece of software, but a little intimidated by the interface, so I will look forward to testing out this new version.
The original reason for limited-edition prints wasn't driven by marketing. The stone or wood block would physically degrade with each print, and after a certain number of runs, the drop in quality was clearly visible (why earlier editions tend to be worth more)
With digital reproduction, this just isn't a factor any more, and limiting the production run is pure marketing; creating an artificial scarcity to inflate the price.
Most of this announcement is just empty art jargon; the elite paying lip service to their vision of the unwashed masses, framing things so the academics won't slam them too harshly, while still walking away with bags of money.
D'ho! looks like I got my "micro" and "milli" prefixes mixed up. Thanks for the correction.
(using 40uSv as a flight from NYC to LA from the XKCD chard as a refrence point)
"A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation"
Wow! that's slightly more radiation than you'd get from a flight over the ocean! Let's all freak out!
"In addition up to 300 tonnes a day of contaminated water is leaking from reactors buildings into the sea"
So...how contaminated is this water? the same as the puddles? More? Less? What is it contaminated by?
More like a broke billionaire who still spends like their wealth will never end.
The Wiring platform (from which Arduino is a fork of) is a great option for getting started.
http://wiring.org.co/
Code wise, It's about 99% the same as Arduino, so all the libraries and code you can find out there is usable, (you just have to tweak the pin numbers)
You can program Arduino boards, wiring boards, AND Atmel chips with the wiring software.
The Wiring S board is slightly cheaper.
And, best of all, the help system is just a lot of commented out descriptions above the code - and it links to a schematic so you know EXACTLY what to build to make the code in the example work.
It's not that factory jobs are for stupid people, it's that factory jobs are boring as hell.
Given the chance, I would (and do) earn half as much doing something that I enjoy far more.
Perhaps you should try selling service or support on top of free software, instead of re-inventing the wheel each time?
"Open Source" is often called "Open Sores" for a reason.
As more countries adopt English as a second language, they are adopting not our convoluted ambiguous mess of a language, but a simplified, neater version of the language that is more suited for clearly expressing technical instructions - eg. close (not open) vs. close (adjacent too)
Unlike languages like French or Korean which have centralized linguistics planning authorities to determine what is and is not correct, English is more of an "anything goes" system where lexiconographers look at what words we use and how we use them, *then* put them in the dictionary.
When 1 billion Chinese, 1 Billion Indians and 1 Billion Africans all start using a standardized "Simple English" over the 350 million of us who speak what we think of as "real English", (and the 70-odd million who speak that odd variant of the language over in Britain) one side will have to make a change, and numbers aren't on our side.
Could you pick up some robertson screwdrivers as well? Last time I shipped a crate to the US, they used crowbars to open it up.
Whenever I ship something big to the US, I make a point to attach a note to the outside of the crate warning them about the Robertson screws, and informing them that for their convenience, I have included a pack of Robertson bits inside the crate.
It isn't just a simple matter of teaching metric either. All these industries and their supporting industries must switch or provide parallel measures (of course, the old timers will stick to imperial in that case, since it's there too). That's very, very, very expensive both in material and time.
That sounds like something that will require a lot of work, and will require hiring a lot of people to do that work.
If only there was an unemployment problem in America...
Is there a video game he is particularly fond of?
Games that are easy to hack and mod are a great start - they are tweaking something they already love. I wasted many hours of my elementary school days tweaking the rules.ini file to make command and conquer's AI a more capable opponent. That lead to scripting one player levels in an attempt to make my own campaign. That lead to...nothing at all....but it might be a start.
The tools available today seem a lot more complex, but also a lot more open than they were when I was young.
Good luck.
I've never used medicinal marijuana (or other prescription pain killers) first hand, but the general consensus I get from people who have is that when they are in genuine pain, the substances make them feel better. When the substances start making them feel high instead of better, they know they are on the road to recovery and can cut back the dosage until it hurts again.
Considering how overdosing on marijuana is impossible in practice, I don't see the lack of precision in dose measurements is a problem. Even if marijuana use turned out to be completely useless medically, it is harmless enough that it's use as a placebo should not be infringed upon.
A 3dB increase represents twice as much "power", but the human ear does not perceive the increase in quite the same way. About 10 dB is perceived as "twice as loud."
Does this work backwards?
Does this mean that a 3db reduction in volume won't really be noticeably quieter, but would make the music about 8 times less damaging to my ears?
I'd start with the TNG episode I, Borg. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Borg)
Recap: The Enterprise adopts a stray young borgling and raises it aboard their ship, giving it a sense of individuality.
I've had 3 female roommates fall in love with this adorable character, and spark enough interest in them to watch a few more episodes - 2 of them are now hooked on Trek.
I don't want to make this sound like I am disagreeing with you in principle, because I do value software freedom, but when I get a tablet or a smartphone, I expect it to just work out-of-the-box. These things excel at being consumption machines, not production machines.
The target audience isn't necessarily a tech savvy one. The more the user is allowed to do, the higher the potential for mishaps. When you promise a customer a fancy piece of shiny hardware and advertise it like a high-tech toaster - "press here, then magic happens" they aren't expecting a full blown PC with all the associated quirks, tweaks, gradual cluttering/slowing down/ buggyness, etc. They are expecting a magic little plastic box that does all the things that were printed on the outside of the big cardboard box it arrived in.
Every additional copy of whatever-it-is is more junk, more clutter, more slowdowns, and the device will not run as advertised for long, by locking things down, it lets the manufacturer ensure the device works the way they want it to until they make it obsolete.
If I want a device that works the way I want it to, I stay away from Apple, tablets and smart phones, and get a real computer.