Hmm. Webster's says that either rivalled or rivaled is correct. Bummer.
The rhyme came from one of Martin Gardner's most excellent Scientific American Books of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions. I'll have to look and see what spelling he used.:-(
Now I, even I, would celebrate
In rhymes unapt, the great
Immortal Syracusan, rivalled nevermore
Who, in his wondrous lore
Passed on before
Left men his guidance
How to circles mensurate.
No evidence that any particular one of them is true.
Yeah, it's hard to compile an accurate history of civilization when assorted travelling religious freakshows keep burning your books.:(
Myself, I'm perfectly willing to believe that all three arson suspects (Julius Caesar, the Catholic patriarch Theophilus, and the Moslem caliph Omar of Damascus) had a hand in the downfall of Alexandrian scholasticism. If the dirty accusations floating around make even one modern-day fundamentalist politician think twice about his/her own place in history before striking a match... then the more blame the merrier.
No, that particular intellectual atrocity can't be laid at the Catholics' feet. You're probably thinking of the torture and murder of Hypatia of Alexandria.
When the Arabs sacked Alexandria in the seventh century AD, the question of the fate of the greatest library of the ancient world was left to one Caliph Omar. His decision must have sounded like the wisdom of Allah Himself to the soldiers with the torches: "If what is written in these books agrees with the Koran, they are not required; if it disagrees they are not desired. Destroy them."
Different instruments, different players, but the song remains the same.
You are heir to thousands of year of Western culture (do the names Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Solomon, Moses, et al mean anything to you?), only by virture of wise Islamic scholars
Would these be the same wise Islamic scholars who torched the library at Alexandria?
In the early 1990s, I had a $2K/year subscription to ZD's Computer Select, just for my personal use. Once I discovered Deja News, I was able to cancel that subscription.
So the answer would be: at least a couple $K a year.
Unfortunately, it never occurred to the rocket scientists at Deja that people might actually be willing to pay real money in exchange for real value. If they'd stuck with their core competency and implemented a subscription model, none of the bitching, moaning, and gnashing of teeth we're seeing now would be necessary.
Everything you've said could have been applied to CDs in 1984.
"Why do I want to listen to music on my computer? That's why I have a stereo."
"It's no big deal to store one little CD in my rack for when I want to listen to it."
Fair use is what enables you to make use of content for non-commercial purposes. It underlies everything from a college student's right to compile excerpts and bibilographies, to the recent judgement affirming your right to space-shift your music onto your Rio. The idea behind fair-use provisions is to limit unreasonable legal controls on your access to copyrighted material. Some of us think that the use of unreasonable mechanical controls should be limited as well, if the intent of the law is taken into consideration.
Your arguments amount to "I don't care about what rights you strip away, as long as I'm not using them at the time. Sounds like somebody else's problem." Wrong.
You're right, though, in that it's a real challenge to get the idea across to Joe Six-Pack.
Do you have an MP3 collection? A directory full of your favorite music in a single easily-accessible place that lets you determine how, when, and where you listen to it?
Would you like to be able to do the same with movies someday, when the necessary storage space is cheap enough?
I'd like to keep that ability (and the right to exercise it without becoming a criminal). And that's why I oppose access-control schemes of all types. They simply don't do a thing for me as a consumer.
I don't like to see the Federal legislative process brought to bear against my fair-use rights. Unless action is taken on consumers' behalf, the lawmaking-by-payola charade that brought us the DMCA will only get worse.
Heh, I'm inclined to agree, +5 for that was a little over the top.:)
I should've put in a plug for Video Essentials, a very useful disc for TV/monitor calibration. Once a TV/DVD player combination is set up according to VE's instructions, a lot of commonly-reported "artifacts" simply won't be visible any longer. Sharpness and brightness are the two most frequently-abused controls on just about any TV set, and Video Essentials can really help you bring them in line.
Nothing can salvage a badly-mastered disc. Fortunately, though, the real stinkers are a lot less common than you'd expect. Most R1 DVDs from the major studios look darned good these days.
Plus, speaking of MPEG artifacts, has anyone else notices how ugly DVD's get when you have a solid dark color. For instance, in dark scenes the whole background becomes a bunch of black squares.
Turn your brightness down, and/or get a better DVD player. This is a common symptom of poor calibration.
I don't know about that. HP has never, to my knowledge, been a threat to Tek's oscilloscope business... not in the 60s, not in the 80s, and not now. Would be curious if you have any concrete market share figures that suggest otherwise.
OTOH, for everything but scopes, HP pretty much owned.
Ok, there's probably something here that I'm not getting, and maybe someone can explain it to me. But after reading their description, I don't really understand why they went to the trouble to digitize the signal at all.
I wondered that, too. I got the impression, though, that they wanted the signal to be undetectable in the relatively-broadband HF receivers of the day, not just undecodable. That meant they needed to distribute the frequency content over a larger chunk of the spectrum, making it sound more like random noise in the AF bandwidth of a conventional monitoring receiver. Wideband linear FM modulation would have been a real hassle in those days (no varactor diodes, for instance), so it may actually have been more convenient for them to drive six separate transmitters with the results of the "digitization."
OTOH I'm pretty sure that contemporary telephone gear was already using frequency-division multiplexing without any digitization at all, so I don't see why they couldn't have accomplished the same thing with an analog filter bank and mixdown scheme.
Garriott's response was that he didn't think there would be a market for networked games (he didn't think that gamers would be willing to invest in networking equipment for games:)
That's hard to believe. I remember frequent conversations at Origin as early as 1987-1988 about how insanely cool it would be to build a "Multima" product. We knew exactly what we wanted to do way back then; UO is a pretty faithful incarnation of what was being discussed. I was no longer working there in '92 but I'm fairly sure there was an active R&D effort on Multima by then (as in, at least one programmer actually tinkering with code.)
Richard wasn't always right about the direction the market would take, but he called this one a good 10 years before it happened.
You would be amazed at just how much technical detail is available on the various NASA web pages. It takes some digging, but the nasa.gov site is not short on geek content... at least not the last time I surfed through it.
That is incorrect. CSS is an optional part of the DVD format. You can master a disc without it (although the evil MPEG consortium still gets their pound of flesh via patent royalties.:)
Some players, like the Apex AD-600, let you turn off their CSS decoder. Doing this will render most, but not all DVDs unplayable. I don't know about Cosmos, though. Certainly they didn't have to use CSS if they didn't want to.
http://www.deja.com/=dnc/home_ps.shtml still seems to be the best way to get rid of the cluttered look associated with Deja's later incarnations. Give it a try if you just want the straight Usenet search from the old-school DejaNews days.
First, IDE hard drives do not fare too well in a bumpy car. Anyone who has ever tried to do anything like this an an automobile can attest to this fact.
You should probably gather some more real-world data before making that assumption. The Maxtor 20 Gb drive in this installation:
...has spent ~5000 miles in the back of a Porsche 968 with a 7-year-old suspension, ~4000 miles in the back of a Corvette, and over 1000 miles in the back of a Honda Accord with no hard-drive problems at all.
Even if it died tomorrow, I'd stand by the assertion that HD reliability is not a real problem. I think that drive cost $250 when I bought it -- it's probably less than $180 now. A lot cheaper than 10,000 miles' worth of gas, that's for sure.
Second, does anyone really need 80 GB of MP3 storage?
Yes. To many people, variety is as important as content.
Actually, no thanks to Jello, we currently have effective treatments for almost all forms of cancer, as long as they're caught in time. We can attack malignancies with surgery, radiation, and/or drugs. Probably a couple hundred thousand people a year are given a shot at surviving cancer thanks to these weapons. Still others get to live a couple years longer than they otherwise would have. Although you can raise some valid questions about quality-of-life in the latter case, hardly any terminal cancer patients seem to want to check out early.
So what has Biafra done for the fight against cancer? What has he done for anything, for that matter? Whining doesn't count. His attitude sounds like exactly the wrong solution for any number of problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. Webster's says that either rivalled or rivaled is correct. Bummer.
:-(
The rhyme came from one of Martin Gardner's most excellent Scientific American Books of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions. I'll have to look and see what spelling he used.
Now I, even I, would celebrate
In rhymes unapt, the great
Immortal Syracusan, rivalled nevermore
Who, in his wondrous lore
Passed on before
Left men his guidance
How to circles mensurate.
No evidence that any particular one of them is true.
:(
Yeah, it's hard to compile an accurate history of civilization when assorted travelling religious freakshows keep burning your books.
Myself, I'm perfectly willing to believe that all three arson suspects (Julius Caesar, the Catholic patriarch Theophilus, and the Moslem caliph Omar of Damascus) had a hand in the downfall of Alexandrian scholasticism. If the dirty accusations floating around make even one modern-day fundamentalist politician think twice about his/her own place in history before striking a match... then the more blame the merrier.
Maybe. Could also be the the ones who invented algebra, too.
Could be, but I kinda doubt it.
No, that particular intellectual atrocity can't be laid at the Catholics' feet. You're probably thinking of the torture and murder of Hypatia of Alexandria.
When the Arabs sacked Alexandria in the seventh century AD, the question of the fate of the greatest library of the ancient world was left to one Caliph Omar. His decision must have sounded like the wisdom of Allah Himself to the soldiers with the torches: "If what is written in these books agrees with the Koran, they are not required; if it disagrees they are not desired. Destroy them."
Different instruments, different players, but the song remains the same.
You are heir to thousands of year of Western culture (do the names Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Solomon, Moses, et al mean anything to you?), only by virture of wise Islamic scholars
Would these be the same wise Islamic scholars who torched the library at Alexandria?
THE DIFFERENCE IS OPEN STANDARDS
You people keep using that term with respect to Java. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Tell me, how "open" is a standard that MS can't adapt and optimize for use with their products without being sued into oblivion?
In the early 1990s, I had a $2K/year subscription to ZD's Computer Select , just for my personal use. Once I discovered Deja News, I was able to cancel that subscription.
So the answer would be: at least a couple $K a year.
Unfortunately, it never occurred to the rocket scientists at Deja that people might actually be willing to pay real money in exchange for real value. If they'd stuck with their core competency and implemented a subscription model, none of the bitching, moaning, and gnashing of teeth we're seeing now would be necessary.
Everything you've said could have been applied to CDs in 1984.
"Why do I want to listen to music on my computer? That's why I have a stereo."
"It's no big deal to store one little CD in my rack for when I want to listen to it."
Fair use is what enables you to make use of content for non-commercial purposes. It underlies everything from a college student's right to compile excerpts and bibilographies, to the recent judgement affirming your right to space-shift your music onto your Rio. The idea behind fair-use provisions is to limit unreasonable legal controls on your access to copyrighted material. Some of us think that the use of unreasonable mechanical controls should be limited as well, if the intent of the law is taken into consideration.
Your arguments amount to "I don't care about what rights you strip away, as long as I'm not using them at the time. Sounds like somebody else's problem." Wrong.
You're right, though, in that it's a real challenge to get the idea across to Joe Six-Pack.
Do you have an MP3 collection? A directory full of your favorite music in a single easily-accessible place that lets you determine how, when, and where you listen to it?
Would you like to be able to do the same with movies someday, when the necessary storage space is cheap enough?
I'd like to keep that ability (and the right to exercise it without becoming a criminal). And that's why I oppose access-control schemes of all types. They simply don't do a thing for me as a consumer.
I don't like to see the Federal legislative process brought to bear against my fair-use rights. Unless action is taken on consumers' behalf, the lawmaking-by-payola charade that brought us the DMCA will only get worse.
Another cool site devoted to Bose: http://www.tuc.nrao.edu/~demerson/bose/bose.html
Oh come on its really *that* informative?
:)
Heh, I'm inclined to agree, +5 for that was a little over the top.
I should've put in a plug for Video Essentials, a very useful disc for TV/monitor calibration. Once a TV/DVD player combination is set up according to VE's instructions, a lot of commonly-reported "artifacts" simply won't be visible any longer. Sharpness and brightness are the two most frequently-abused controls on just about any TV set, and Video Essentials can really help you bring them in line.
Nothing can salvage a badly-mastered disc. Fortunately, though, the real stinkers are a lot less common than you'd expect. Most R1 DVDs from the major studios look darned good these days.
Plus, speaking of MPEG artifacts, has anyone else notices how ugly DVD's get when you have a solid dark color. For instance, in dark scenes the whole background becomes a bunch of black squares.
Turn your brightness down, and/or get a better DVD player. This is a common symptom of poor calibration.
I don't know about that. HP has never, to my knowledge, been a threat to Tek's oscilloscope business... not in the 60s, not in the 80s, and not now. Would be curious if you have any concrete market share figures that suggest otherwise.
OTOH, for everything but scopes, HP pretty much owned.
Ok, there's probably something here that I'm not getting, and maybe someone can explain it to me. But after reading their description, I don't really understand why they went to the trouble to digitize the signal at all. I wondered that, too. I got the impression, though, that they wanted the signal to be undetectable in the relatively-broadband HF receivers of the day, not just undecodable. That meant they needed to distribute the frequency content over a larger chunk of the spectrum, making it sound more like random noise in the AF bandwidth of a conventional monitoring receiver. Wideband linear FM modulation would have been a real hassle in those days (no varactor diodes, for instance), so it may actually have been more convenient for them to drive six separate transmitters with the results of the "digitization." OTOH I'm pretty sure that contemporary telephone gear was already using frequency-division multiplexing without any digitization at all, so I don't see why they couldn't have accomplished the same thing with an analog filter bank and mixdown scheme.
Garriott's response was that he didn't think there would be a market for networked games (he didn't think that gamers would be willing to invest in networking equipment for games :)
That's hard to believe. I remember frequent conversations at Origin as early as 1987-1988 about how insanely cool it would be to build a "Multima" product. We knew exactly what we wanted to do way back then; UO is a pretty faithful incarnation of what was being discussed. I was no longer working there in '92 but I'm fairly sure there was an active R&D effort on Multima by then (as in, at least one programmer actually tinkering with code.)
Richard wasn't always right about the direction the market would take, but he called this one a good 10 years before it happened.
You would be amazed at just how much technical detail is available on the various NASA web pages. It takes some digging, but the nasa.gov site is not short on geek content... at least not the last time I surfed through it.
That is incorrect. CSS is an optional part of the DVD format. You can master a disc without it (although the evil MPEG consortium still gets their pound of flesh via patent royalties. :)
Some players, like the Apex AD-600, let you turn off their CSS decoder. Doing this will render most, but not all DVDs unplayable. I don't know about Cosmos, though. Certainly they didn't have to use CSS if they didn't want to.
True, but Deja's newsgroup browser, like all HTML-based NNTP browsers, blows goats. I don't tend to use Deja for anything but searches.
To do a newsgroup topic search, you just select "Forums" in the "Results type" menu.
http://www.deja.com/=dnc/home_ps.shtml still seems to be the best way to get rid of the cluttered look associated with Deja's later incarnations. Give it a try if you just want the straight Usenet search from the old-school DejaNews days.
Prove to me the your life has value.
:)
Trivial. Attack me, and the proof will become self-evident.
first woman in space (Sally Ride)
You seem to have misspelled "Valentina Tereshkova."
Weird, Slash stuck an extra space in my closing /a bracket for some reason....
First, IDE hard drives do not fare too well in a bumpy car. Anyone who has ever tried to do anything like this an an automobile can attest to this fact.
You should probably gather some more real-world data before making that assumption. The Maxtor 20 Gb drive in this installation:
http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/cplayer.html
...has spent ~5000 miles in the back of a Porsche 968 with a 7-year-old suspension, ~4000 miles in the back of a Corvette, and over 1000 miles in the back of a Honda Accord with no hard-drive problems at all.
Even if it died tomorrow, I'd stand by the assertion that HD reliability is not a real problem. I think that drive cost $250 when I bought it -- it's probably less than $180 now. A lot cheaper than 10,000 miles' worth of gas, that's for sure.
Second, does anyone really need 80 GB of MP3 storage?
Yes. To many people, variety is as important as content.
Glad to see there's a cure for cancer.
Actually, no thanks to Jello, we currently have effective treatments for almost all forms of cancer, as long as they're caught in time. We can attack malignancies with surgery, radiation, and/or drugs. Probably a couple hundred thousand people a year are given a shot at surviving cancer thanks to these weapons. Still others get to live a couple years longer than they otherwise would have. Although you can raise some valid questions about quality-of-life in the latter case, hardly any terminal cancer patients seem to want to check out early.
So what has Biafra done for the fight against cancer? What has he done for anything, for that matter? Whining doesn't count. His attitude sounds like exactly the wrong solution for any number of problems.