I'm giving up modding to point this out, but perhaps you might want to consider that many systems in nature tend to be a kind of check-and-balance. There are effects in the system which dampen the issue, things which remove carbon from the air and bind it. If we continue to increase the CO2 levels, we will overwhelm those checks and then all hell will break loose.*
The other thing I'd like to mention is that there really are more things to consider than just CO2 levels in terms of global warming. I don't think that human carbon dioxide emissions will be the end of us, but it could trigger the chain of events that leaves our planet much less hospitable to us. Have you heard of the methane hydrates in the cold sea bed?** It's possible that a small shift caused by our increasing carbon dioxide emissions - even if they have to increase by another 30% or maybe more - will push the temperature over a critical threshold and trigger a cascade which will again cause all hell to break loose.
So in a way, you are right. Except in climates which are around a sensitive temperature (e.g. Those areas where the temperature hovers near 0 degrees C) there is very little change right now. That could be that CO2 emissions are having a very minimal effect on the temperature, or more likely IMO, that's just that we haven't quite overwhelmed the checks that are in place./rant
A brew-your-own brewery that I frequent regularly buys hops in rather large quantities. Over the course of the last year, the same size container went from $50 to $290. He was forced to raise his prices for the first time in 5 years!:(
Maybe not all types of hops have gone up so much, but the prices are rising.
I don't mean to be obvious, but if they have _one_ screen, how would you suggest that they fold it? Cause lack of folding would essentially double the size of the device when it's not in use.
What if you're not the one who does it "The first time around"? You mention that most code is generated by idiots... Don't you think that there's a good chance that many programmers might find themselves in a new position, being asked to implement new features into an old system that your predecessor (one of the idiots you mention) managed to somehow bludgeon together?
Another scenario (this time it's personal experience): A co-worker and I were asked if we could design an in house resource management system. Management wanted to keep this very low budget, meaning we had to use the tools available (VERY LIMITED) and nothing which would take more resources than a couple of co-op students knocking the idea about in their spare time (i.e. no resources at all). Although both of us have coding experience, neither of us had used the language available to us, nor do we do any sort of programming in our daily jobs.
We started discussed a couple of different approaches and we started knocking out bits of code that were really only meant for testing ideas about the language and putting together a rough sketch of the program. Unfortunately, one of the bosses saw a nearly-almost-halfway functional version out of this, showed it to his boss, who got excited, and then handed the code off to another employee to finish (actual resource allocation now that upper management approved). He unfortunately was a sloppy programmer and did a mediocre job at finishing the project. The system that resulted from that is still in use today, although over the last few months has started to show aberrant behaviour, reacting slowly, and any time a new feature is added it gets worse. "Tutorial" code we originally would have scrapped became a "functional" system, and it was made worse by a sloppy programmer who didn't understand the need for commenting (He actually deleted most of my comments out, because they "distracted" him).
In either of these situations, does it not sound like refactoring may do this code some good?
I remember hearing about a scam that two ladies ran that allowed them to fleece millions of dollars from the military due to a method in which something was shipped priority to the military. They would charge ridiculous sums (sometimes > $10000) to ship small things, and in one case it was some nuts and bolts as well. Maybe related? I don't see how even rigorously tested nuts and bolts could be $100 each.
I recently bought a MBP and I'm getting used to it as well. One large difference that I've noticed between the Windows Family and OS X is that even when you close all of an application's windows it stays running. It was a little strange at first, but now I enjoy it. Terminating a program with command-q seems to be a system wide shortcut for whichever app is running in foreground.
Minimizing windows in OS X isn't really useful, as the GP said, it is rather frustrating to have to use the dock (I use quicksilver for pretty much everything except when I accidentally minimize a window). The longer I use my MBP the less I get the urge to minimize windows though. The only reason I used to minimize windows was so I could find another window (Expose does this faster), or because I wasn't using the associated application for a while but wanted to keep it running (Now I just close the application window instead and leave it running).
The fact that shortcut keys are inconsistent is annoying, but at least the command key can be used by applications. I think I used the windows key for 3 or 4 different keystrokes, and that was it. With the command key, I find it allows an extra range of key combinations.
But if everything worked off of "one cable" then they couldn't charge you for their own semi-proprietary version. My Motorola phone uses the a miniature version of the regular USB device end, and they want to charge some ridiculous price for a cable (which is of course only available through them). Luckily for me, my POS Sony camera has a cable which fits.
I'm on Roger's here in Canada (Ottawa actually), and the auto time calibration works on mine, a Motorola V360, but I had to dig through the menus to enable it. Even then, it only corrects the time as a step of powering on. I've never checked with anyone else though, I assumed it worked for everyone because it worked for me.
I was trying to be on the conservative side so I wouldn't be accused of artificially inflating my numbers. I like your ideas and views... Too bad that at this rate it will never happen.
Except for the lucky few, musicians or "artists" are rather on the poor side. I play in a local band, so many a time after a show we hang out with the headlining act. I see behind the scenes, behind the image... Signed musicians, and they sleep in their van, taking shifts driving to the next show. If they're lucky, someone in town offers them a place to crash for the night. That doesn't really sound like a bunch of people making >= $200k/year to me.
Yeah the stadium filling acts have tour buses and roadies and groupies and all that, but the vast majority of performing musicians make enough money to stay alive and on the road, if they're lucky.
Also, don't compare music and movies. Making music involves a band, a couple of engineers, and possibly a studio musician or two for the "extras". Next time you go see a movie in theaters, sit through all the credits... Try to count the names. Music involves a couple of handfuls of people to create, a movie requires hundreds. Now, to clarify, I'm not in any way for the high prices and I'm not defending current copyright laws (I believe the system is broken personally). I'm just pointing out that movies and music are on different levels.
I'd just like you to consider quickly, although the evolution of music recording (not making) technology has brought the ability to record to anyone who is willing to spend a rather small sum of cash, it is not "top end", the higher end stuff is still rather expensive. Most of the home studio equipment is like a virtualization of the real thing.
I think you're overlooking the skill component of the mixing/mastering process. Anyone can get the equipment but very few can do even a decent job with it. It's like saying that because you can buy a decent painter's setup (easel, canvas, paint supplies) for not too much, we should sell paintings on the cheap.
It's the skill component that makes a big difference. The fact is, audio engineers go to school for years to learn/refine the skills necessary to making a good mix. Even then, not everyone can do it. That's why it's such a specialized field.
I'd also like to point out that it's not the musicians that are expecting a huge profit, they get almost nothing from the labels. The studios would like to make some decent cash, considering how much they had to invest in their equipment and training. The ones who are really raking in the cash are the music labels, and they're the ones that are driving the prices higher and higher. The musicians have no say in the pricing of their work. As soon as they sign the contract, they lose almost all rights to the labels.
The technology behind computers isn't just similar, it IS the technology behind distributing digital music. The processing power that cost a quarter million dollars twenty years ago costs a few hundred now. The cost of distributing a dozen songs (a CD that actually did cost a few dollars to stamp and ship twenty years ago) is now a download from a server that costs them only fraction of a cent, but they still want us to pay 1988 prices?
While I somewhat agree with a couple of things you say, I must add; Do you even know what you're talking about? I think you're just wildly spewing out numbers because you want something for nothing. Back up your figures or stop making things up.
Besides, your model of "cost" only takes the cost of distributing into consideration. The cost of creation needs to be taken into consideration too. Look into the pricing on your average studio. At your price of $0.01 a song, it would take anywhere between 50000-100000 or more purchases to make a song break even. That's not even counting money for the artist(s) to live off of, or the cut that the record labels want to get for their efforts in advertising.
I'm not saying the current price model is fair, I don't know the break down. I'm also not saying I agree with the strategies of the large record labels, I personally dislike them and the stranglehold they have on the market. But, consider the larger picture before you shoot off that songs should be available for $0.01.
And tell me, what do you know of the music industry? Or are you just another arm-chair critic? Do you think "Knowing someone" is all that it takes? Let me ask a question... If your boss gave you half a million dollars and said to hire a team for whatever important project, would you take someone you knew who wasn't in the higher end of the talent pool? That'd be asking to lose your job. It's the same thing here. "Knowing someone" is enough to possibly get the talent shark to pop your CD in ahead of the other 50 CDs he's been given in the last week. It won't get you anything else. Unfortunately, they only choose the bands that they think will make them the most money, not the most musically diverse or interesting.
Yeah, knowing someone who is in the business will help you, but probably less so than knowing someone who already works for a company that you want to work for. As far as putting up with shit, musicians put up with some rather slimy people. Not to provide too much of a generalization but bar and club owners tend to not be the most wholesome crowd. Imagine busting your ass, pulling in a crowd of about 100-150 people @ $10 a ticket each + whatever the bar makes in drinks, and then getting paid $300, which is then split 5 ways... $60 per head is not really a lot of money. Or you could drive your collective asses to another city, probably in a large vehicle which isn't too good with the mileage, only to get told the gig is canceled/postponed and someone forgot to tell you. It'd be like going to work one morning and getting told to go back home, that they didn't need you that week and you weren't getting paid.
And no-one ever said you don't get rejections and sarcasm and all those lovely things from other jobs... But musicians put up with more of it than many. I'm speaking as a musician local to my city, who is trying to branch out at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
I Am Not A ________
I'm giving up modding to point this out, but perhaps you might want to consider that many systems in nature tend to be a kind of check-and-balance. There are effects in the system which dampen the issue, things which remove carbon from the air and bind it. If we continue to increase the CO2 levels, we will overwhelm those checks and then all hell will break loose.*
/rant
The other thing I'd like to mention is that there really are more things to consider than just CO2 levels in terms of global warming. I don't think that human carbon dioxide emissions will be the end of us, but it could trigger the chain of events that leaves our planet much less hospitable to us. Have you heard of the methane hydrates in the cold sea bed?** It's possible that a small shift caused by our increasing carbon dioxide emissions - even if they have to increase by another 30% or maybe more - will push the temperature over a critical threshold and trigger a cascade which will again cause all hell to break loose.
So in a way, you are right. Except in climates which are around a sensitive temperature (e.g. Those areas where the temperature hovers near 0 degrees C) there is very little change right now. That could be that CO2 emissions are having a very minimal effect on the temperature, or more likely IMO, that's just that we haven't quite overwhelmed the checks that are in place.
* (IANA Environmental Scientist, so there may be a margin of error in the direness of my predictions)
** http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/02/26/methane-global-warming.html
A brew-your-own brewery that I frequent regularly buys hops in rather large quantities. Over the course of the last year, the same size container went from $50 to $290. He was forced to raise his prices for the first time in 5 years! :(
Maybe not all types of hops have gone up so much, but the prices are rising.
I don't mean to be obvious, but if they have _one_ screen, how would you suggest that they fold it? Cause lack of folding would essentially double the size of the device when it's not in use.
Wish my mod points didn't expire yesterday.
You sound like my boss.... Except he's not joking when he does that. :(
Choosing between bad and possibly worse? That's sort of sad, but unfortunately true of most politics these days it seems.
What if you're not the one who does it "The first time around"? You mention that most code is generated by idiots... Don't you think that there's a good chance that many programmers might find themselves in a new position, being asked to implement new features into an old system that your predecessor (one of the idiots you mention) managed to somehow bludgeon together?
Another scenario (this time it's personal experience): A co-worker and I were asked if we could design an in house resource management system. Management wanted to keep this very low budget, meaning we had to use the tools available (VERY LIMITED) and nothing which would take more resources than a couple of co-op students knocking the idea about in their spare time (i.e. no resources at all). Although both of us have coding experience, neither of us had used the language available to us, nor do we do any sort of programming in our daily jobs.
We started discussed a couple of different approaches and we started knocking out bits of code that were really only meant for testing ideas about the language and putting together a rough sketch of the program. Unfortunately, one of the bosses saw a nearly-almost-halfway functional version out of this, showed it to his boss, who got excited, and then handed the code off to another employee to finish (actual resource allocation now that upper management approved). He unfortunately was a sloppy programmer and did a mediocre job at finishing the project. The system that resulted from that is still in use today, although over the last few months has started to show aberrant behaviour, reacting slowly, and any time a new feature is added it gets worse. "Tutorial" code we originally would have scrapped became a "functional" system, and it was made worse by a sloppy programmer who didn't understand the need for commenting (He actually deleted most of my comments out, because they "distracted" him).
In either of these situations, does it not sound like refactoring may do this code some good?
I remember hearing about a scam that two ladies ran that allowed them to fleece millions of dollars from the military due to a method in which something was shipped priority to the military. They would charge ridiculous sums (sometimes > $10000) to ship small things, and in one case it was some nuts and bolts as well. Maybe related? I don't see how even rigorously tested nuts and bolts could be $100 each.
I recently bought a MBP and I'm getting used to it as well. One large difference that I've noticed between the Windows Family and OS X is that even when you close all of an application's windows it stays running. It was a little strange at first, but now I enjoy it. Terminating a program with command-q seems to be a system wide shortcut for whichever app is running in foreground.
Minimizing windows in OS X isn't really useful, as the GP said, it is rather frustrating to have to use the dock (I use quicksilver for pretty much everything except when I accidentally minimize a window). The longer I use my MBP the less I get the urge to minimize windows though. The only reason I used to minimize windows was so I could find another window (Expose does this faster), or because I wasn't using the associated application for a while but wanted to keep it running (Now I just close the application window instead and leave it running).
The fact that shortcut keys are inconsistent is annoying, but at least the command key can be used by applications. I think I used the windows key for 3 or 4 different keystrokes, and that was it. With the command key, I find it allows an extra range of key combinations.
In Canada mine comes up as $115 for the student edition.
But generally the antivirus is actually still protecting against viruses... Just not the viruses that were released since the last update.
But if everything worked off of "one cable" then they couldn't charge you for their own semi-proprietary version. My Motorola phone uses the a miniature version of the regular USB device end, and they want to charge some ridiculous price for a cable (which is of course only available through them). Luckily for me, my POS Sony camera has a cable which fits.
I'm on Roger's here in Canada (Ottawa actually), and the auto time calibration works on mine, a Motorola V360, but I had to dig through the menus to enable it. Even then, it only corrects the time as a step of powering on. I've never checked with anyone else though, I assumed it worked for everyone because it worked for me.
I think you might have missed the fact that he was looking for indie bands
I was trying to be on the conservative side so I wouldn't be accused of artificially inflating my numbers. I like your ideas and views... Too bad that at this rate it will never happen.
Except for the lucky few, musicians or "artists" are rather on the poor side. I play in a local band, so many a time after a show we hang out with the headlining act. I see behind the scenes, behind the image... Signed musicians, and they sleep in their van, taking shifts driving to the next show. If they're lucky, someone in town offers them a place to crash for the night. That doesn't really sound like a bunch of people making >= $200k/year to me.
Yeah the stadium filling acts have tour buses and roadies and groupies and all that, but the vast majority of performing musicians make enough money to stay alive and on the road, if they're lucky.
Also, don't compare music and movies. Making music involves a band, a couple of engineers, and possibly a studio musician or two for the "extras". Next time you go see a movie in theaters, sit through all the credits... Try to count the names. Music involves a couple of handfuls of people to create, a movie requires hundreds. Now, to clarify, I'm not in any way for the high prices and I'm not defending current copyright laws (I believe the system is broken personally). I'm just pointing out that movies and music are on different levels.
I'd just like you to consider quickly, although the evolution of music recording (not making) technology has brought the ability to record to anyone who is willing to spend a rather small sum of cash, it is not "top end", the higher end stuff is still rather expensive. Most of the home studio equipment is like a virtualization of the real thing.
I think you're overlooking the skill component of the mixing/mastering process. Anyone can get the equipment but very few can do even a decent job with it. It's like saying that because you can buy a decent painter's setup (easel, canvas, paint supplies) for not too much, we should sell paintings on the cheap.
It's the skill component that makes a big difference. The fact is, audio engineers go to school for years to learn/refine the skills necessary to making a good mix. Even then, not everyone can do it. That's why it's such a specialized field.
I'd also like to point out that it's not the musicians that are expecting a huge profit, they get almost nothing from the labels. The studios would like to make some decent cash, considering how much they had to invest in their equipment and training. The ones who are really raking in the cash are the music labels, and they're the ones that are driving the prices higher and higher. The musicians have no say in the pricing of their work. As soon as they sign the contract, they lose almost all rights to the labels.
The technology behind computers isn't just similar, it IS the technology behind distributing digital music. The processing power that cost a quarter million dollars twenty years ago costs a few hundred now. The cost of distributing a dozen songs (a CD that actually did cost a few dollars to stamp and ship twenty years ago) is now a download from a server that costs them only fraction of a cent, but they still want us to pay 1988 prices?
While I somewhat agree with a couple of things you say, I must add; Do you even know what you're talking about? I think you're just wildly spewing out numbers because you want something for nothing. Back up your figures or stop making things up.
Besides, your model of "cost" only takes the cost of distributing into consideration. The cost of creation needs to be taken into consideration too. Look into the pricing on your average studio. At your price of $0.01 a song, it would take anywhere between 50000-100000 or more purchases to make a song break even. That's not even counting money for the artist(s) to live off of, or the cut that the record labels want to get for their efforts in advertising.
I'm not saying the current price model is fair, I don't know the break down. I'm also not saying I agree with the strategies of the large record labels, I personally dislike them and the stranglehold they have on the market. But, consider the larger picture before you shoot off that songs should be available for $0.01.
Whoa, you made tin foil contacts? I gotta get me a set of those!
One hack to rule them all...
Same here... A link would be much appreciated. I've never found any problems with it, but I haven't looked very hard.
And tell me, what do you know of the music industry? Or are you just another arm-chair critic? Do you think "Knowing someone" is all that it takes? Let me ask a question... If your boss gave you half a million dollars and said to hire a team for whatever important project, would you take someone you knew who wasn't in the higher end of the talent pool? That'd be asking to lose your job. It's the same thing here. "Knowing someone" is enough to possibly get the talent shark to pop your CD in ahead of the other 50 CDs he's been given in the last week. It won't get you anything else. Unfortunately, they only choose the bands that they think will make them the most money, not the most musically diverse or interesting.
Yeah, knowing someone who is in the business will help you, but probably less so than knowing someone who already works for a company that you want to work for. As far as putting up with shit, musicians put up with some rather slimy people. Not to provide too much of a generalization but bar and club owners tend to not be the most wholesome crowd. Imagine busting your ass, pulling in a crowd of about 100-150 people @ $10 a ticket each + whatever the bar makes in drinks, and then getting paid $300, which is then split 5 ways... $60 per head is not really a lot of money. Or you could drive your collective asses to another city, probably in a large vehicle which isn't too good with the mileage, only to get told the gig is canceled/postponed and someone forgot to tell you. It'd be like going to work one morning and getting told to go back home, that they didn't need you that week and you weren't getting paid.
And no-one ever said you don't get rejections and sarcasm and all those lovely things from other jobs... But musicians put up with more of it than many. I'm speaking as a musician local to my city, who is trying to branch out at the moment.
IE tab requires the IE rendering engine to be installed on the computer before it will work.